Fugue 23 - Spring 2002 (No. 23)

Fugue 23 - Spring 2002 (No. 23)

The Literary Digest of the University of Idaho

Spring/Summer 2002
FUGUE
Department of English Brink Hall 200 University of Idaho Moscow, Idaho 83844-1102
FUGUE
Spring 2002, VoL. 23
Managing Editor Scott McEachern Prose Editor Matthew Vadnais Poetry Editor Mary Ann Hudson
Staff Paul Cockeram jennifer Ilirt Taya Noland Jessamyn Birrer/Schnakenberg Melissa Montgomery Darlene Jones Aaron Stanton Stephanie Lenox Ryan Myers Kristin Rigsby
Layout Sarah Wichlacz Cover Design Sarah Wichlacz Faculty Advisor Ron McFarland
Fugue (ISSN 1054-6014) is a journal of new literature edited by graduate and undergraduate students of the University of ldal1o's English and Creative Writing progran1s. Fugue is made possible by funding from tl1e University of Idaho English Department and is published biannually in the Fall and Spring.
Subscriptions are $12 for 1 year (2 issues) or $23 for 2 years (4 issues) made payable lo Fugue. Add $4 per year for international. For back issues, write to Fugue at the University of Idaho, English Dept, 200 Brink Hall, Moscow, ID, 83844-1102. Submissions: Submissions accepted Sept. 1 through May 1 (postmark dates). Please address to the appropriate editor and send with SASE to Fugue, English dept., University of Idaho, 200 Brink Hall, Moscow, ID. 83844-1102. Prose up to 6,000 words pays $10 and one year subscription. Poetry, alJ forms, pays $10 and one year subscription. Please send no more than four poems or 6,000 words of prose simultaneously. Submissions in more than one genre should be mailed separately.
Cover art 771e Tyger, by Cori Flowers, 2000. Interior arl Untitled No. 1 and 2, by john Bennett, 2002.
�2002 in fue names of fue individual aufuors. Subsequent
rights revert to fue aufuor upon publication with the provision that Fugue receives publication credit. Printed by University of Idaho Printing and Design.
Contents
Letter from the Editor ........................ ..... .................. 6 Letter from the Prose Editor.................................... 8 Letter from the Poetry Editor.................................. 9 PoetryAndrea Dmgay Go Sa.ilin& Delete Us .................................................... 11 Fallen .............................................................................. 12 Erica O lsen Eye ExanJ ....................................................................... 20 Oliver Rice On the ExpHcation ofMaps .......................................... 21 Darren Kerr Le voyage dans la June ..................... ........................... 22 Richard Bentley Omon Variallon / ........................................................... 49 Victoria Tolbert She .................................................................................. 50 Amy Elenor Parker - First Place Poem Thomas Edison Films the Electrocullon ofan Elephant ................................................................... 52 Gina Tabasso My Mother ..................................................................... 73 Christian Horlick Alief ................................................................................ 74 Pamela Yenser- Third Place Poem On the Road with Howdy Doody ................................. 75 Ellen Wheale Letter to my Younger Self............................................. 76 E.M. Schorb The Crow and the Scarecrow ........................................ 85 Margaret Walther Mask ofthe Owl ............................................................ 86
Elizabeth B. Thomas UndeTwater .. ....................... ..... ............................. ... ....... 90 Ander Monson - Second Place Poem Everything Has Two Uses ............................................. 91 Terrance Hayes A Poem !Or WJsdom ................ ..................................... 104 Serenade........................................................................ 117
FictionGreg Seagle
Dead Fathers .................................................................. 13 Suzy Spraker The Cook and the Cashier............................................ 39 Ander Monson - First Place Story Other Electricities.......................................................... 60 Sean Aden Lovelace CrowHunting ................................................................. 87 Nathan Oates - Second Place Story On the Cutting Board.................................................... 92
EssaySarah Dickerson The Clock Would Drop ................................................ 23 Tora Triolo The SmallDetails ofThings ......................................... 77 Terrance Hayes More Tbeones ofthe Duende....................................... 106 ArtJohn Bennett Untitled No.1 ............................................................... 10 Untitled No.2 ............................................................... 118 Contributors' Notes .................................................... 119
Letter from the Editor
After two issues, I am in a position to look back upon the last year and not only remember fondly our successes but also look at more issues that need attention as our magazine enters a new and important era. And as a child needs guidance to achieve great success in life, so the staff of Fugue continues to cultivate and sustain our fledging publication into a nationally recognized forum for quality work. As many of you know, the current issue of Fugue holds the results from the first ever Spring Contest in Poetry and Fiction. I consider tJ1e contest a great success and the quality of submissions set a precedent that we can only hope to surpass in the coming years. FurtJ1em1ore, the Contest has placed Fugue squarely in the path of economic autonomy, an important goal Matt and Mary Ann and I set out to achieve in the deep summer of last year. Every spring Fugue will run a contest, and hopefully by next year at this time, we will count the personal essay among the genres we judge. Putting on a contest is an arduous and difficult process in many ways, not the least of whjch is the picking of stories and poems that were qualified to appear before the eyes of our judges. From the conception of ilic contest, to placing ads in Poets and Writers and ilie A UP Chronicle, to managing the superb manuscripts iliat began to appear in great numbers in our office, to ilie carefully chosen fmal decisions by ilie jury boards regarding ilie set of stories to pass on to Mr. Moody and the stellar poems for Mr. Doty. Mr. Moody and Mr. Doty were gracious and generous in contributing ilieir time for reading, and I wish to take iliis moment to iliank them. Along wiili ilie contest, anotJ1er phenomenon that happened this year was Fugue's appearan ce at the Associated Writing Program's Annual Conference in New Orleans. Sitting at our table in the very midst of tJ1e bookfair, we scattered our nan1e across other journals' tables in ilie fom1 of book trades, we made contacts wiili otJ1er similarly minded publications, and generally, as Mary Ann succinctly put it, "made a huge splash" in the minds of iliose attending. Finally, a word about tl1e issue wiiliin. It has been a difficult process, but rewarding because personally, I have learned a great
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deal about managing a small magazine in the last year. But aside from these practical difficulties and successes, the theme of this issue seems to be one of death. Many of the stories and poems struggle to make sense of humans' short time on earth. Yet at the risk of sotmding sentimental, our little issue of death, so to speak, can only end with something like an aspiration to find meaning among a world politically fragmented and immdated with apathy. I would like to think that tl1e staff of Fugue, because of our work in producing a work of quality and sharpness, place ourselves, our readers, and our contributors, direclly on a path to solace and stability.
Scott McEachern Managing Editor
Spring/Summer 2002
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Letter from the Prose Editor
From where I am sitting, Fuguds first annual fiction and poclly contest has had some immediate and, I hope, lasting effects upon the magazine. First of all, tJ1e sheer volume of fiction submissions sent to Fugue went tJ1rough tJ1e roof. Our readers spent many, many hours selecting finali sts lor Rick Moody to chose from. A happy side effect of ilic contest, iliough, was a large stockpile of very strong stories, many of which didn't make it into iliis issue: we rejected more good stories U1<ll1 ever before. While I don't enjoy having to tum down qualjty writing, ilie bounty of great work made ilic selection process as enjoyable as it was difficult. My biggest worry at the outset was iliat the contest would make it harder to put logeilier a cohesive issue. I am confident iliat tills - ilianks to ilic hard work of Scou and my jury board - did not happen. I am an1azed by the continuity of iliesc stories, especially between ilic contest winners and ilie issue at large. Nearly every story carries tJ1e weight of loss. What's more, nearly every story becomes preoccupied wiili mapping out how loss changes people by taking place alier the ac1 story of loss, as if a tape 1ml recorder were simply left on, and what we are getting is U1e real story's aftereffects. Characters become obsessed witJ1 radios, commit to sobriety, or refuse to leave tJ1eir homes for reasons they barely understand, coping wiili events tJ1at we are not fully privy to. The details ofloss remain in ilic background, working as shadow that falls on characters' new routines, some of tJ1cm successful, some not, some interrupted by new, more pressing circun1stances. While I an1 happy wiili tJ1c ways in which iliese stories are similar, I an1 as proud of the ways in which they differ. If, as I believe they arc, these stories arc mapping sinlllar territory, none of iliem are using the same instruments.
Matilicw Vadnais
Prose Ed1ior
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Letter from the Poetry Editor
There was no turning back once the editorial staff secured judges and placed "call for submissions" ads in Poets and lifJ-jters and A UP Chronjcfe for our first annual contest issue. Though Fugue is ten years old and has done nothing but improve with age, doing something very differently is always a risk. However, we were so incredibly pleased with the quality of submissions we had been getting, from all over tl1e country, and impressed with the sheer voltm1e of submissions, we were quietly sure the contest would frame an even better issue than Nun1ber 22, which is, in my opinion, a very fine issue. I an1 thrilled to report the great success of Number 23, the contest issue. I am certain, after reading, literally, hundreds of poems for iliis issue, that poetry is stronger than it ever was on this continent. I believe the contest poems ref1ect the conversations poetry is having right now. The three placed poems uncover a vividness of language, and most interesting, a knowingness in the voice. These are millennia! poems, surely. The winner, Amy Eleanor Parker, has �written a poem of such huge, gorgeous grace and sureness of vision, that I knew when I gave "Thomas Edison Films the Electrocution of an Elephant" to Mark Doty with twenty other extraordinary poems it would capture his attention. Many of the poems from that groups of final twenty are published, in this issue, among the three contest poets. I couldn't give them up. I received such a great many exciting, interesting poems. It was very difficult to pare the submissions down from any stage. I am ever grateful to Mark Doty for his generosity of spirit and his willingness to carefully consider your work. Finally, I chose the poems in this issue as representatives of how I see poets writing right now. I have been deeply interested in what the lyric is doing; there is a kind of new renaissance of the prose poem and of formal concerns; finally, the humor is welcome, and my god, the language. Thank you, all of you.
Mary Ann Hudson Poetry �<jjtor
Spring/Summer 2002
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j ohn Bennett
Untitled No. 1
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Andrea Dmgay
Go Sailing, Delete Us
Maybe her dictum is just a vessel, poor mother (cau help a widow, yes, no?)- her flowers receive courtship, today's cunning of the language yearns for more and more agony. Much as my vessels may be dictum for mother, come wid1 me, I plead you, and we'll conquer, deliver, and give nothing. Now I know and can alter and be so, now see I'm empty, the sunrise has been given in rose. Me, I'm nodding, can alter, can rescind my seeing, or be the last in mother's cavalcade, taking my own. Poor came ilie roses, bushes, and ilie flame under our passage to ilie house (I lost many- tell home they know to end my scent, to eat it), came imitating our lost races, but oh, tears, ah.
Come with me, I heard in echoes on d1e albums we know, maybe her dictum is just a vessel, poor mother. Ignoring delays god, voices ascend, o n a morning day, lose ilie key, my cool mother.
Spring/Summer 2002
II
Andrea Dmgay
Fall en
When she sleeps she undrearns water, violet green and moss She cannot be unbeautiful although her hands are ribbon tied and crossed When she was old, her white dress fell unlaced and chill bare flesh retum ed her young and colorless to buffalo and mountainside, her ginger sunset pale so late so late, so sleep and holy floating cautions peace against the dark, dark night She is not here, she walks through halos saved by golden halos, ripples on the water surround her body, halos She is not saved, she is not strong, in sleep, so late, so peace and pale, undrearning lavender and falling scents, uncrossed, untied and bound She white and old, now young, now w1believing, answer words her whiteness pales her halo loosens pale and loosened, fallen petals float inside.
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Gregory Seagle
Dead Fathers
I see images of dying fathers, wasting, bony, touched by dementia. This is your father, maybe, from what you've told me, or some other father, from a book. But it is nol my father dying. My father is half-shaven, collapsed across a bed, clutching or not clutching his spent heart. lie is full-bodied, big, and lucid till his heart explodes. I have no time to prepare for hin1 dying, the small comfort of your father's dementia. My sister calls me. Her lover is leaving for Califomia. "Santa Barbara," she says. I turn down the television. She once had a lover in Santa Barbara. I tmderstand the irony, she knows, as no one else would. She had never told anyone else how the lover almost died - heroin - and my little sister, a baby really, waiting for the ambulance. Barely twenty years old, waiting for the ambulance. Not just waiting. Resuscitating.
She is crying over the phone. I turn the television down to a whisper. She had sworn me to secrecy. No one was to know - not our parents, not my wife. I have never spoken a word of this, not even again to my sister. I have been alone with this secret, and it has sometimes seemed a stone weighing me down. Not even my secret, re.ally, yet it reminds me at times of how alone I can be. She left her lover, then we all forgot his name. And then our father died. She wants to visit his grave. It's her therapist's idea. She has never, since the funeral, been able to go there. I visit regularly. I feel guilty about the marker. "CPO." A free
Spring/Summer 2002
13
marker from the Navy for my fatJ1er's wartime tours. WW2. Korea. But the rank is wrong on IJle marker, my mistake in tJ1e requesting paperwork. I tell myself I'll get him a better, nou-military marker someday. When I have tJ1e money. It's been a dozen years. My sister doesn't know how to find the grave. "I can't remember," I say, "IJle name of the section. 'Sycamore,' maybe, or 'Larch.' I don't know. I just go Lo it" I can't go "'rith her that day. I've a son, four months old. llis motJ1er's at work. Our marriage is broken. I have a class to teach in a few hours. It's too complicated to go. I'm crying, as I hold my son. "'Larch, I think,'" I say. My sister is grieving over IJle phone. "Santa Barbara,'' she repeats. I can't. tell her that my marriage is broken. There arc tears on my son's scalp, and down his cheeks. My sister is crying.
On television, in endless rerun, Magnum retreats from the 4th of july. None of his friends know why. Every year. They think it might have something to do wiiJl his wartime tour. Dead comrades. Or his dead wife. The secrecy grieves tl1cm. It seems a withdrawal from intimacy. It angers them. I turn up the volume. I dou't know why. I an1 distracted. My sister is crying. I listen to t.he ocean in a conch shell, watch the world IJlrough a matrix of television dots. California. I Iawaii. Magnum goes out int.o the ocean, and loses his way, his para-ski, his way home. lie is treading water, praying for rescue. But no one knows he is lost.
I have, for longer Ulan my father's been dead, as part of a career tJ1at is part this and part iliat, worked with three blind men. For four years, long ago, I lived wiiJliJlem. My faiJler knew them. My father knew their dog as a puppy, stinking up the house. They
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loved that dog because it was ordinary. They each had their own seeing-eye dog. But this dog was just an ordinary dog - untrained, stinking up the house - and they shared it in ordinary fashion. It's July 2 as my sister calls, as Magnum treads water. On July 4th the dog would be 14, but in January the dog died. Someone else, someone new in the blind men's lives, drove Cindy to the vet lo die. My sister is also named Cindy. In January my son wasn't born yet, but my marriage was broken. No one knew this, not even my wife. The blind men comforted me. Cindy was old, they said. Magnum has flashbacks. lie remembers his father. Sweet things from early childhood, confidences from later childhood. Camping. Boating. Baseball. I remember my father's hairy arms. Ilow I kept secret from hin1 for months my first marriage's breaking up. "I thought you'd be disappointed in me," I said. "I would never be disappointed in you," he said. "I only feel sad for the pain you must be feeling." I wanted him to wrap his hairy arms around me, but he didn't. There is this picture in my mind of your father in the bushes outside your house. lie and your mother are separated, not yet divorced. She has custody of the children. lie misses you. lie is mentally ill. lie hides in the bushes and imagines you doing your homework, or getting ready for bed. lie is weeping. Your mother tells you he is crazy, a liar. You picture his hairy forearms lifting you, laughing, skyward, or spanking you, crying. lie pictures you doing homework you never do. But no one knows you never do it. You go to bed. You picture on the ceiling the icc rink he made you of the backyard at another house, another time, when his mania made gardens and ice rinks and made tl1e ceiling let in stars. You have a drean1. You have always had this drean1, from the time of the bushes, or before. A bear is chasing you. A bear is
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chasing you. A bear is chasing you. Why didn't the teachers ever send home a note? "Sherry doesn't do her homework." Your sister thinks all you ever got was A's. It isn't true. There is something you will never remember about your father. You've retrieved a doll you had when you were little. You're amazed at the missing fingers and the broken-off toes. You can't imagine abusing your doll this way. Maybe it was your little sister abused the doll. You tell me: doesn't she look like you, your doll? Two days later, you have a dream. You approach your old house. Your mother is with you, your sister is with you, your doll is with you. "Wait here," you tell them, while you go inside. There is something in there you could never approach before. Why now? Dead fathers, why now? You tell me you will always see my wife in my son. Tlus fills me with despair. My life is bleak. Things which should fill me with joy, don't. I weep with my son in my arms. You weep, I weep, when we are in each other's arms. Dead fathers. I lift my son, my hairy forearms skyward. My mother tells me secrets, tells me things now that I've an infant son that I didn't know. When I was an infant my father spent weekdays and nights in Norfolk. The Navy. The Korean War. Not a CPO, a Chief Bosun's Mate. I knew some of this. What I didn't know was that my mother was working. The B&O. During days I was kept by a Russian woman. On Sunday afternoons my father would go to get Mrs. Young and take her to our house before he left for Norfolk. On Friday evenings he would come home, and return her to her house. What kind of a Russian nan1e is Young? I don't remember her, my secret, second mother, leaving as my father came home,
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coming as my fatJ1er went away. When I picture my father dying, half-shaven, chest hair spilling over the top of his T-shirt, I sec his thick, hairy forearms clutching steering wheels, clutching his heart, lifting me goodbye as he left for Norfolk. Magnum remembers his father teaching him to tread water. Just a few more, just a few more. llis father embraces him - a new world's record he tells his son. Magnum is treading water, treading water, just a few more, praying for rescue, though no one knows he is lost. lie never tells anyone where he goes on the 4th of July, or why. It's personal, private, a secret. In your drean1 you approach your old house. Your bony, dementia-starved failier dances in his deathbed. You are sad, frightened, lost. lie is a vision from Dachau or Auschwitz - both perpetrator and victin1 - a skeleton with hairy arms spanking you, clutching at you. You yearn to embrace hin1. The drean1 ends. You wake crying, remembering his death, the bushes, ilie homework no one knew you never did. Why your failier's dance terrifies you is a secret, even to you. You wake. I an1 covered in your tears. Despite his secrecy, they know, Magnum's friends, where he is. Somehow, where he is. Covered in his tears, they know. They find him, treading water, treading water. H is father had promised, his father had promised. On the 4th, for the 4th, he'd be home. It was WW2, or Korea. lie doesn't come home. After his death, we fotmd secret caches of my failier's life. Letters he'd saved, dreams he'd written down but never told anyone, candy bars secreted because of his diabetes - eaten privately, we imagined, alone - a list of the money I owed hin1 for which he'd never asked. They were not such terrible secrets. We wouldn't have beSpring/Summer 2002
17
grudged him the candy bars. I had not forgotten what I owed him. We were only sorry for the pain he must've been feeling. Now I am sorry that my father never got to meet my son. I wonder will I get diabetes, will my son gel diabetes, will our hearts burst Will we ever stop crying? My therapist suggests that what I need is closure. I told her this dream. W e arc all together - you, me, my son, my wife, your family, my wife's family, my family. In some big house somewhere to the north. Vermont, maybe, New H ampshire. I am 700 miles from home. Everyone is getting along, but me. I can't gel along with anyone. My friend Tom comes to the house and asks me what's wrong with me, why an1 I so sour? I have no answers, only anger, sadness. I take my son by tJ1e hand, and we walk off tJrrough the snow, homeward, 700 miles away. We walk away. lie is too small to walk, but in my dream, hand in hand with me, he walks. My therapist suggests that what I need is closure. I tell my wife that it's over. She cries. I feel tiny. The walls of the house close in around me. I feel closed-in, not closure, like my skin might burst. I call my sister, tell her that my marriage is over. She cries. "It's okay," I say, "it's okay." "I know," she says, "I know." It is summer. No snow in the graveyard. Over the grass my son and I go. lie is in my arms. "Larch," not "Sycamore," we come to my fatJ1er's grave. There is no need to change the marker. I may never have the money. There is no need. I lift my son up high, in my hairy arms, toward the sky. I tell my fatJter that my marriage is broken. I laugh, like I'm a crazy man standing there, my son lifted toward tJ1e high, open sky. In a secret place my wife and I conceived our son. The night before, or the night after, you and I made love. I
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couldn't tell you what I'd done. When I knew of tl1e baby growing, I couldn't tell you that eitl1er. It was too terrible a secret U I told you, you'd be disappointed in me, you'd leave me. The baby cries in the nursery you and I have made him in our new home. Covered in your tears, I think of Mrs. Young's arms arOtmd me, her tears for a Russia left behind. You hear the baby crying before I do- my son, not yours. You go to him. Magnum's friends pull him, hairy-chested, from the water. You bring my son to our bed. "A bear was chasing him," you say, and you place him in my hairy arms, then lie beside us. lie nestles between us, an arm on you, a leg on me. Mrs. Yotmg pulls Magnunl from tllc water. She is not his fatller - he will forget her but she loves him. I feel us cradled in Mrs. Young's arms, in our fatllers' arms. "Tell me all your secrets," you say. I don't know where to begin, what I will remember, what forget, what lies of my own I believe myself, what secrets are solitary, impenetrable stones.
Spring/Summer 2002
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Erica Olsen
Eye Exam
She sits in the chair, in amber light I ler eyes are full of liquid from the drops. On the other side of the apparatus sits the doctor. She can feel him breathing, and his knees. "Did you ever look at the sun?" he asks. "When you were a child? Maybe at an eclipse?" I t's her first time seeing him. When she says "no" and asks why he asked, he says, "There's a scar on your eye. It's a typical burn scar from looking at the sun. It doesn't affect your sight" She is nearsighted, and many doctors have looked at her eyes, but none has ever told her of this scar. Now she confesses that a few nights before, at the house of a friend, an amateur astronomer, she looked at the moon through a telescope. That was another fu�st time seeing- those mountains, seas, and craters. When she raised her head a silver beam streamed from the eyepiece, so bright, she mentions, warily. The doctor says, "Oh, this isn't from looking at the moon." On the wall of his office hang photographs taken in New Guinea: the doctor and a bi.bal chief, both of them with their faces painted. lie goes each year with a group, doing eye operations free of charge. In New Guinea, he says, he restored the sight of a man so o ld, and blind so long, the first white man he ever saw was the one who cut the cataracts from his eyes.
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Oliver Rice
On the Explication of Maps
Suppose along this coastline, these mnning vagaries, these coves and bights suppose along these capes and bayous there were no conceits, no silhouettes of a protagonist curled in sleep, kneeling to drink from a mountain stream, shrinking, hand upheld, as if to delay the truth.
Suppose among this island chain, these little continents, there were no similitudes of a Roman nose, an ann strewing seeds, a mouth half open, as if to call out to the nearest available person.
Mother of God, suppose across this hinterland, these foothills and prairies, there were no intimations of a mother waking, a candidate seizing victory, a missing person driving tlu�ough the night in pw-suit of his n�ibulation.
Spring/Summer 2002
21
Darren Kerr
Le voyage dans Ia June
I let you take me up, convinced you'd lied; A moon is only dust, unfeeling rock. You break o m orbit, wheeling like a hawk That's sighted prey. Dissolve. Cut to: Nightside. The frame is filled with white - yow� ship's airlockAnd then a slow zoom out O ut of sun's sight, you guide; I fo llow, tethered, in your steps and, weightless, walk.
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Sarah Dickerson
The Clock Would Drop
Time sped up and flew around the bend. Never knowing when, The clock would drop and the walls would cave in ... - Brandon Dickerson
This is the dream: My mother finishes washing the last dish. I wake, and step into the living room, and watch her. She works in the tiny kitchen of our summer cottage, rubbing her wet hands on the apron tied around her waist. I feel groggy. Muddled. I need some coffee. I make my way to the kitchen but can barely push myself forward. My feet feel like lead as I drag them, one in front of the other, struggling toward the coffee pot. Mom is busy wiping off the cow1ter tops, paying no attention to my progress. VVhen finally I make it to the refrigerator, I pull out a gallon of milk and fUI my coffee cup with it That's not right. I turn to empty it into the sink. Lumps of green mold pour out with the thick white liquid. Mom tums with her hands on her hips and glares at me. I rinse the cup again and again, but each time I dump it, milk pours out and goes down the drain wlule globs of mold remain in the sink and get stuck in the strainer basket. My mother snatches the cup from me and grabs the pot of coffee, then fills my cup and hands it back. "For God's sakes, Saral1! VVhat's wrong with you?" I feel so foolish. I take the cup from her. It is now brimnung with gray, ashy clay-like mud. I carry my mud-filled cup to the deck where my father and sister are sitting in the one place warmed by sunlight. Neither are speaking; they are both looking out over the cli1T at tl1e bay. The lake is its beautiful morning blue, a deeper blue than any
Spring/Summer 2002 23
other time of day, and the air is cool and damp. I set my cup on the railing and look down into the ravine where the small foot bridge crosses to the path down to the beach. My brother, Brandy, still lies there, partly covered with wet dead leaves from last fall and surrounded by newly sprouted green ferns. I stare down at him, exan1ining his features. lie looks perfect but evenly gray. Like an unglazed clay sculpture. I shift my stare from my brother to my father, Dad's gaze still fixed on the stm-speckled surface of the lake. "Shouldn't we get rid of him now?" I say to him. "Oh," he awakens from his trance. "You think so?" I walk back into the cottage to get a garbage bag. I don't care what anyone thinks anymore. Enough is enough. But Brandy is standing in the kitchen next to my mother. She stands by the stove cooking the ground beef that we didn't have a chance to grill the night before - or was it the year before? lie stands with his knees bending awkwardly inward, locked in place, dressed in dirty blue jeans and a leather jacket. Mom gives the beef a quick stir and turns the burner off. She hurries out the back door to take the clothes ofT the line and Brandy follows close behind her. I an1 holding my newborn baby in my arms. "Look." I call out to him. "Look. See? It's my baby - Emily. Brandy? See her?" lie nods, smiling approvingly as he follows my mother out the door. I watch them in the backyard, Brandy standing quietly beside my mother, stepping down tJ1e length of the clothes-line with her as she deftly removes the pins and tosses both the dried laundry and the clothes-pins into the basket. I msh back to the deck and lean over the railing. lie's still there. I see Bethy bmshing the dead leaves off of him. lie isn't clay-like anymore, but looks asleep. lie wears nothing but swimming shorts, his dark hair soaked and flattened against his scalp, his eyes partly open. Bethy lifts one of his arms over her shoulder and �wraps her other arm arow1d his slippery "''<list. gmntting, she pulls him up off the ground. llis head flops against her cheek and falls onto her shoulder face first. She turns her face away
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from his and stops for a moment holding her breath. She pushes his head away from hers and stubbornly drags his dead weight out of the ravine. "I'll take care of him," she says, heading around the cottage to the driveway. "I'll take him home."
In early june of 1971, we are at our cottage on the shores of Gr-and Traverse Bay. just as we are every summer. It is before the neighbor kids arrive for the summer, before the lake warms up for swimming. We are stuck with each other - my oldest brothers Travis and Lndy with Brandy, and Bethy with me. My sister and I sleep in the mmn cottage with our parents, and my brothers in the single-room, A-frame cottage out back. Bethy and I are rarely allowed in the little cottage. Our brothers tell us to go away, go play in the traffic. Bored and lonely, we have only each other, and we sit on the beach watching sand spiders, picking up handfuls of sand to bury them and watch them escape. Sometimes, if Travis and Lndy won't play with Brandy, then Brandy will play with Bethy and me. Most of the time he teases us and tells dirty jokes. lie pretends to crack eggs on our heads or shows us how to carve our initials into our skin with a safety pin. Sometimes he lets us take puffs off his cigarette. This time, he announces himself by throwing a garter snake over the cliff. It lands belly up beside Bethy and quickly flips upright in panic, wiggling frantically and slithering in the sand. Bethy screan1s, runs to the steps off the beach, and begins to cry. I leap to my feet and see Brandy standing on the cliiT, pointing at us and holding his belly in mock, spoken laughter. "Bah! Ila, ha, ha, hal" "Get it away! Take it away!" Bethy cries in fear on the steps. Brandy comes down to the beach, and passing Bct11y he says, "Don't be silly. It won't hurt you." lie goes after the snake and grabs it, and holding it in his hands he carries it toward her on tl1e steps. "See? It won't hurt you," he holds its head up close to her face.
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She screams again, louder. "Get it away!" Brandy sits in the sand, holding the snake loosely, and I sit down beside him. lie looks back at Bethy still shivering in fear on the steps. "Look. I'll even put it down my shirt You'll see. It won't hurt me." lie pulls out his collar and sticks the snake inside. W e watch as it crawls out from under his shirt and into his lap. "See?" he says to Bethy. She comes off the steps, curious and suspicious, and sits in the sand beside us to take a closer took. "I can even put it down my pant')," he says, standing and pulling the waist of his pants away from his belly and dropping the snake in. lie jiggles and dances around on the sand, and we laugh, both of us saying "geez!" and "ew!" and "yuck!" until it appears at his ankle and crawls out onto the sand. "See?" Sometimes when things get really dull, he'll entertain us by contorting his skewed body into strange positions, placing one leg behind his head, or extending his elbows and knees so far in the wrong direction it looks as though they were put on backward. The weirdest thing is the way he can jitter his eyeballs. lie puts his face up close to mine and stares. With every muscle in his face still, his blue eyes jitter into a blur. It freaks me out every time. Brandy's body is weird. lie is tall and skinny with an elongated torso, his legs strangely short in comparison, and crooked. IIis shirts can't be tucked into the waist of his pants, and his pants are too long for his short crooked legs. IIis face is too long and his mouth too small. And in the middle of his long narrow chest is a deep crater-like hole - a caved-in sternum. When he lies in the sand on his back, Bethy and I fill the hole with water from a plastic toy bucket.
External exanunation: B ody length: 74 ind1es; Weight: estimated 200 lbs; /lair: long black scalp hair; Skin: unremarkable. Group circular and semicircular defibrillalor paddle appliCildon
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Ft.:Gt:Ett23
sites are clustered arOLmd the left areolar area. Just like the television show. One of them yells: "Clear!" and then you hear an explosive, jolting thud. They check for a heartbeat, d1en do it again. "Clear!" Rigor Mortis: present; Jlead: symmetric; Eyes: Corneal donation has been carried out as requested They removed his glittering blue eyeballs, cut them out of his head. We get a thank you note. R-zcies: symmetric; Nose: unremarkable; Neck: unremarkable; Chest: slight pectus excavation. Slight, my ass; we filled it with water. Internal examination: Liver: weight 2600 grams; Spleen: 300 grams; Pancreas: 250 grams; Testes right: sperm present descended bilaterally. The right testes is removed and san1pled. I wince. Bra.~i1: 1510 grams. Cerebrum, right and left hemispheres: Maintenance ofnormal cortical nhbon with unremarkable white matter beneath braJn. Sampled brain: unremarkable. I heard once that d1ey neatly slice the scalp under the hairline and stretch it all the way back so they can saw off the top of the skull. That way, they can put the brain back in, stick the top of the skull back on, and pull ilie scalp back in place. You'd never know. Stomach: intact viscous contaJning an estJn1ated liter ofpardy mastJcated food content part of which looks to be of fi-uit appearance. I don't remember him eating fruit iliat day. We drank whisky slushes. !!earl: leli. ventncular myocardium is site of subendocardial scar deposits wluch are not accompanied by necrosis .... Sampled aorta bears eVJdent recent hemorrhage on adventJiial surface wluch is pardy hylanized .... Elas11c sla.Jn reveals diminished and irregular elasuc fibers. What? Final Anatom1c Diagnosis: Dissecang aneurysm thoraCic aorta with rupture, pencardial hemorrhage and tamponade. Left ventricular myocardial hypertrophy and scar deposits. Fal1y inliltraSpring/Summer 2002 27
tion of Hver. They write this up in a foreign language. Later, we understand. lie went off like a time bomb, progranm1ed to die prematurely. It is Marian's Syndrome - a rare genetic defect that caused his connective tissues to weaken, his ligan1ent.s to become loose and stretchy. They think Abc Lincoln had iL Paganini too. The real danger was hidden. The walls of his aorta, the main artery leaving the heart weakened and frayed w1til it ripped like wom fabric - it was inevitable. lie was gone within a heartbeat, maybe two, the doctors say. It could have happened at any time. lie is a funny looking baby, strangely skinny and long with a deep little crater in his tiny chest My mother affectionately calls him her hi:tle war orphan. She tells us, thirty-five years later, that he wasn't put together right. We knew that Pediatricians are conccmed about his chest; afraid it will obstruct ilie functioning of his heart or lungs. They keep an eye on him for a little while. One of them warns my parents iliat he may have problems with it one day. Another says he is fine, there is no need to worry. So they don't. Mom tells us that Brandy used to play alone for hours on end, rarely needing her attention. By the time he is speaking it is a language my motl1er can't understand, a language all his own. My parents listen to their fmstrated son as he tries to explain- who knows what - himself, d1e world, what's up witJ1 ilie dog across the street. As he grows older, the neighborhood children tease him because he is odd, a kid with a constant nmny nose which he forever wipes on his sleeves. His school teacher thinks he's retarded and he never listens in class. By third grade Mom tells Brandy to simply smile, look up, at least pretend to pay attention to his teacher like his older brother Tra\~S docs. lie comes home a week later and tells Mom "But if I do tJ1at, then I really can't understand what she's saying." An elementary lab school teacher at the university spots Brandy's intelligence. They test his I.Q. and suggest he attend a
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school for gifted children. He'll have a difficult time in a regular school, they explain. Most of his teachers will not understand him and otl1er children will tease him for being an oddball. lie may suffer tmtil he was old enough to understand and accept that he is different. The nearest school is in Detroit, and my parents can not afford to send him. As he enters junior high school many of his days are spent in ilie principal's office. lie sets orr ilie fire alarms, smokes in ilie bathroom, skips school constantly. lie does as he pleases and not what he's told. I see him walk to school one day, barefoot and wearing slacks designed after the American flag with stars on his butt and red and white stripes down his legs. lie is not rebellious, just oblivious to mundane concerns like shoes. By ilic tin1e he is in ilie eighth grade ilie school system is fed up, and because Brandy refuses to participate in detention, iliey make him do janitorial work. They give him a broom. lie looks at it, leans it against ilie wall, and walks out ilie school's doors. "You have to do sometl1ing about him," tl1e principal tells my parents. "No. You have to do someiliing about him," they respond. Neverilieless, my parents are losing ilieir minds. When he comes home from school that day, my mother is yelling at him upstairs in ilie house. I hear a scuffle and Brandy is crying. She is so frustrated she is kicking him, missing his bull and bruising his crooked legs. Brandy drops out of high school in ilie tenili grade. Two years later he armounces he is going to Hollywood to find his fan1c and fortune as a rock-n-roll star. My older broiliers Travis and Lindy join him a year later, and iliey all form a rock and roll band they call "Mr. Wilson." I've always thought of my brothers as a trio, all of them born eighteen monilis apart. There arc a lot of pictures of them - the three of them sitting or standing according to height and age, sleeping in beds in a row, eating on one side of the dinner table, playing togeilier on the beach. Later, they all play the guitar, and
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like the Beatles, they all grow their hair, then mustaches, then beard. Then tl1ey all shave and get hair cuts again. Still, Brandy was odd, the odd third-born son. Someone we knew, somehow, was never meant to be. Mr. Wilson plays together for ten years, always hoping for that big break. At the same time, Brandy catches up, gets his GED, earns a bachelor's degree in philosophy at UCLA. I still have a photo of him with scraggly long black hair, proudly wearing his cap and gown. lie looks terrible. After he graduates, he doesn't know what to do. just once, he puts on a suit for a job interview and gets a haircut ''I hope you didn't tell him to clean his fingernails," I tell my motl1er. "Oh my God, I had to," she replies. "lie never would have thought of it on his own." And he wouldn't have. lie didn't get the job and delivered pizzas instead. In August 1992 we join together at the cottage on the shores of Grand Traverse Bay, just as we do every summer. Everyone except Travis, who shuns tl1ese family get-togethers. This is the fourili day of our vacation - Thursday, and we are at Ken and Sandy's house on nearby lake Bellaire. Brandy cheated at golf yesterday. lie kept sticking his ball up on a tee no matter where it landed. I said, "You're not supposed to do that. It's cheating." lie said, "Bal1! Who cares?" Typical. Ken is our cousin, and every year he and Sandy have everyone over for the day. I am four and a half months pregnant and lying on my back in the grass talking with Bethy, my hand shielding my eyes from ilie sun. It is quiet by the lake; a gentle breeze glides across the surface, rippling the otherwise flat calm of the blue water. Puffy clouds float overhead below blue sky - perfect for waterskiing. Aunt Jane and Uncle Warren are talking to Mom and Dad up on the patio, and my husband David is playing wiili
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FLG!JE #23
Esther on the bit of artificial beach a few feet away. I am glad he is keeping her occupied. "Iley!" A pack of cigarettes drops from above me and lands next to my head, held up on blades of grass. "jesus, you scared me!" Brandy plops dov11n next to his cigarettes, pulls one from the pack, and lights it. "Ken's getting ready," he says. "Are you gonna ski?" "No," I awkwardly pull myself up into a sitting position. "Doctors say I'm not supposed to take on activities I'm not used to." "That's ridiculous." lie blows smoke carelessly into the warm air. I suddenly want to smoke. lie thinks everything is ridiculous. lie leaps up off the ground and I see him looking over the edge of the lawn where it hangs over the shore line. "Man! Look at the snakes!" I look over and see water snakes, two of them - three of them, slithering along the top of the water, disappearing under the bank where the lawn ends abruptly, and reappearing again. I hope Esther won't see them, and I know now that Bethy won't ski. She hates snakes. "I am NOT going into that water!" Bethy remarks, as I knew she would. She sips on a whisky slush. Sandy makes a whole pitcher of them when we get together. "Well that's just ridiculous!" says Brandy. Everything's ridiculous. He takes ofT his shirt, and then his shoes and socks and leaves them next to his cigarettes on the lawn. I can see the deep indentation in between the two small nipples of his bare chest. llis knees are cocked strangely backward. lie's always been that way. lie's getting heavy now though; he's gained a bunch of weight working at Dominos in L.A. lie and Bethy flew back togetl1er. Lndy and Rose and tl1eir kids came on tl1eir own. David comes over with Esther and leaves her with me, and Brandy and David wade out to the boat. Lndy goes too, and so does my step-son Thomas and the rest. of the kids. One by one, Lndy lifts the children into the boat. I stand up and take Esther's
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hand. We head up to the patio to join the relatives, and Bethy follows. David is first. The boat idles as Ken hollers instructions to David and designates Lindy and Brandy as spotters. "Ready?" he yells and David, with his head back in the water and his skis up in tl1c air, nods. We watch as the boat speeds off down to the far end of the lake with David successfully in tow. "Charlotte?" I hear Sandy sing from within the house. "You want a whisky slush ?" "God no, I'd fall off tJ1e deck," says Mom. "You're not drinking, Sarah ?" asks Aunt]ane. "I'd better not." "They're good," Bethy says and slurps on her drink. She takes a scat in a white plastic patio chair and props her feet on ;mother in front of her. I think she's on her third. Rose sits next to her holding a pair of binoculars. Esther hand-feeds Uncle Warren potato chips. lie opens his big mouth to accept each one from her ljuJe hand and then grins stupidly. "IIa!" cries Rose. "What?" I say. "lie can't get up on the skis," she is looking through tJ1e binoculars and laughing. "Who?" "Brandy, he keeps falling down." And tllen it is quiet. The boat drifts silently at the other end of tlle lake. Aunt Jane and Mom are talking and I hear Rose speak again. "There's somefuing wrong down there." "They probably gave up 011 hint," says Mom. "He's too klutzy to get up on those skis." She laughs and Aunt Jane smiles. The boat remains floating at the far end of the lake. We wonder what could be holding them up. Time passes, and fma.lly, the boat heads back. No one is skimg. "I guess they rud give up," I say to Dad.
32 n;Ct;E #23
Now the boat is speeding toward shore, full throttle, the tow rope left in the water. It is bouncing and skimming crazily along the surface, showing no signs of slowing even as it approaches. Ilow odd. Ken is going to slam the boat into the shore. Everyone's arms are waving and crossing wildly over their heads. The engine cuts, and the boat continues to skid motorlessly toward the shore. I see arms still waving, and a distant sound of the children crying. And then a sudden, screaming shout: "CAlL 911! NOW !" It echoes loudly over the flat blue water and across the lawn. We remain motionless on the patio. The few puffy clouds suspended in the air above us seem to stop drifting along. I can still see what a beautiful day it is - sunny, blue sky; the lake calm, quiet. I hear the children crying. Someone repeats: "CAIL 911!" The boat's motors scrape the rocky bottom of the lake and make a dull cnmching sound. Sandy turns suddenly and, ripping the sliding screen door off its frame, runs inside. Sobs erupt from behind me and grow into arrhythmic wailing. Loud mournful crying pierces the silence that just a moment earlier surrounded me. "Oh my God!" Mom cries out, sobs catching in her throat "Oh my God, he's dead!" She repeats it. "lie's dead, isn't he?" I've never heard anything like it before in my life. Who? What? Bethy kicks the chair in front of her out of the way and goes to Mom. "It's okay, it's okay. They can jump start him. They do it all the time. It's okay." Jump start him. Children are lifted one by one out of the boat, including Thomas, and walk toward the shore. Jump start him? I stand. Dad rushes across the lawn and into the shallow water, flinging his arms in the air. "Oh my God!" The cries of the children mix with the horrible noise my mother is making and all I can hear is "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay." It's
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Bethy's, and she has her arms around Mom's heaving shoulders. I grab Esther to protect her. From what? She straddles my swollen belly, and I carry her inside to the kitchen. Sandy stutters into the telephone . "We need an ambulance ... he's not breathing and .... " She looks out of the kitchen window. "And he has no heart beat." No heart beat With Esther still on my belly I look out too, and see Ken in the boat pushing. Ken is pushing and dipping below the rim of the boat: one, two, three, and then dipping and then pushing: one, two, three. No heart beat? My legs wobble, and the kitchen turns on its side, uprights, tips the other way. Esther slips from my arms. I focus on the image outside the window, the boat, and Ken pushing still, and Dad in the boat with him bent over, looking down. "They're working on him now," Sandy talks on the phone. "Please.... " "Mommy?" It is my daughter, and I shift focus, blankly looking at her inquiring face. "Mommy," I hear her say. My own mother's wailing noises in the living room arc growing louder. I never heard such a thing. "Mommy?" I see her, my daughter next to me, but she is far away. "It's okay," Bethy is saying. "They're taking care of it. Ken knows what he's doing." "Mommy?" I have to go. I make my way to the bathroom and struggle, my hands shaking, to pull off my shorts, and before I sit my bowels begin to empty and run into the toilet My heart thuds and I feel myself suck in air and then hold it. I hear Dad yelling "Brandy!" Other voices join his. I hear Lndy's, and then David's: "Brandy!" Their voices echo in the silence of the motionless afternoon. And I sit on the toilet, holding on for dear life to my hard belly. I pull sheets of toilet paper from the roll and wad them up. The bathroom tilts, then rocks, and to stop it, I focus on the wad in my hands.
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Ft:CL"E #23
I get up off the toilet and go back into the kitchen. "Mommy, I want some pop." Esther wants pop. Red pop. I find some on the kitchen counter and pour a paper cup full. I hand it to her and usher her into the living room. Bethy has moved Mom inside and has given her a glass of water. We sit. Finally. The sound of helicopter can be heard growing louder, thundering overhead. I step outside. The rhythmic pounding as it nears vibrates the house and shakes the ground. It produces a powerful wind that ripples the still water of the lake and flattens the grass as it lands in the yard. It is almighty. The windy enormity of its presence and the words "Life Flight' spread across its body ofTers reassurance and relief. just like television. The rescue team leaps out. "We can't work on him in there! Get him out of the boat! Get the kids inside!" I turn away. Then look. They have lifted him, lifeless, out of the boat and put him on a stretcher. I hear shouts and the thud of the defibrillator paddles. The helicopter's propeller whirls and chirps quietly nearby. After the third jolt of the paddles, the rescue team scoops up the stretcher, slides it into the helicopter, and one by one, they jump in behind it. The helicopter's engine grows loud and shrill, and the propeller revolves into a blurry circle blowing wind into our stunned faces. It lifts off the lawn and swings rapidly around just above the rippling lake, simultaneously climbing higher and speeding south. Lttle time elapses after my parents and Bethy and Lndy leave for the hospital thirty miles away. Painfully little time, maybe fifteen minutes, since the helicopter look ofT. A sheriff from Antrim County calls, and David answers the phone. His voice quavers. "Okay... okay... yes... thank you for calling...thank you." lie hangs up, and turns to us. "lie's dead." lie is dead. We cry and hug each otl1er appropriately. Esilier spills her red pop on ilie carpet. We decide to leave and go back to ilie cottage to wait for ilie
Spring/Summer 2002 35
others. Atmt Jane hands me the package of ground beef Mom brought for the burgers. I hand it off to Rose, and go down toward the shore to pick up his things - his shoes and T-shirt, his pack of cigarettes. I light one and smoke, my heart stubbornly beating in my chest, and I stare across the stiJI water of the lake. A few boaters are out there; motors buzzing softly along the surface of the water in the distance. The late afternoon is dead peaceful. I feel blank, empty of feelings except for physical ones. My belly is heavy and pushed against my knotted stomach, though I forget, for moments at a time, that I'm pregnant The cigarettes are giving me a headache. I experience an overwhelming fatigue laced with aimless energy, like I need to get up and move around, but when I do, I need to sit down and rest. It begins to grow dark. As the sun sets over the bay, they pull into the driveway - Mom, Dad, Bethy, Lindy. One by one, four car doors open, then close, and they walk separately and quietly tl1rough the back yard and around the cottage to the front deck. "Are you all right?" I ask my father. lie erupts in tears and holds onto me. "Oh shit!" he cries. "Shit. Shit. Shit!" David and Rose move in and out of tl1e kitchen, taking care of ilie kids, taking care of us. David makes toast with peanut butter for my parents. Mom takes small bites, sips a glass of milk. She is slouched over and sounds stuffed up. Lindy sits in a chair beside Mom and Dad. Bethy sits next to me on steps leading to the foot bridge, her head down, her elbows on her knees. "Did he pay you back for golf yesterday?" I ask her. She chuckles softly. A sob catches in her throat. She stares at ilie grotmd and Dad pulls Brandy's wallet out of his shirt pocket and hands the money in it to Bethy. She waves it off, but he insists. I wonder at what point he got Brandy's wallet. "What are you gonna do with it?" I ask. All the details matter. "Throw it out. We don't need it," Dad says. We sit. It is so careless of Brandy to be absent during this
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Fl.:GL'E 1123
trauma. lie's always been so careless; it used to piss everyone ofT. This is his fault and he is being unfair. Typical. On Friday, Travis arrives from Los Angeles. Lindy and David go to Elk Rapids to make cremation arrangements. According to my parents' wishes, there will be no funeral, no disposal of remains. There will be an autopsy today. When they return, Lindy comes out on the deck and tosses a billing statement on the table. "The funeral director offered to take the ashes and put them in the bay Saturday. Says he does it all the time for people." Mom stands up and groans, then marches into the cott:.:'1ge. Lindy looks around. "What else could I do?" he says. "He said if we didn't pick them up, he'd have to shelve 'em. I figured it was better than sticking them on a shelf." I look down at the billing statement. "Transportation from Munson Medical Center to the American Crematory in Gaylord: $400. Crematory requires container. Corrugated pine box: $400. Crematory's fee: $1000." On Saturday, Mom gathers Brandy's stuff, including an old tennis bag, and gives them to Dad. lie takes it all out back to the burning barrel, and I watch from a distance as Travis and Lindy and Dad stand quietly while the flames consume my brother's belongings. I wonder if ashes float and disperse on the surface of water or if they sink and settle to the bottom. I wade out into the water. The bottom is rocky until I'm in up to my waist and then I can feel the texture of the rippled, sandy bottom. The lake is freezing. I hold a bottle of shampoo in one hand and a bar of Ivory soap in the other, but it is too early in the summer to tolerate going all the way in. By the middle of]tme, I can manage a quick dunk, lather my hair, and make another quick dunk to rinse. In july it warms up and makes bathing easier, and by August it's
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perfect for swimming and riding waves on inflatable rafts. I know Brandy is out tl1ere somewhere, or everywhere. lie was ilirown in at the end of last summer. I thought about the lake last fall when I was home, and how it must have grown colder, and again in January and February when it would have silently frozen over wiili huge mountains of icy, rocky snow piling up as far as you can see across the bay. It was as iliough we left him behind, alone in the water, after tl1e cottage had been closed down for ilie season and we'd all gone home. I've never been certain where my brother went or where I was supposed to put him. lie waded out to the boat and tl1at was ilie last I ever saw of him. If not in the ground, if not somewhere in heaven, where was I going put my brother now iliat he was dead? Grand Traverse Bay is big, iliough it's only a small cove carved into ilie noriliwest corner of the lower peninsula. Our cottage sits on ilie shore at the mouili of the bay, where it opens up into Lake Michigan and connects with all the otl1er Great Lakes iliat wrap around ilie state. They divide ilie U. S. from Canada until they dwindle down and out into the St. Lawrence Seaway and leak into ilie Atlantic. All iliose oceans cover iliree-quarters of ilie earili. Everybody knows iliat. So where is Brandy? I ilirow ilic shampoo and soap back on shore and I look up at the cliff. I imagine Brandy there, dressed in faded blue jeans and a leailier jacket, holding a snake and laughing: "Bal1! Ila, ha, ha, ha! Don't be silly! Just dive in!" My legs are numb, and before I have time to think about it, I plunge into the icy water.
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FlXGE #23
Suzy Spraker
The Cook and the Cashier
The cook's answer is to remarry the cashier. This time they'd do it in the spring, maybe June. The cook slides his soda can from one end of his dining room table to the other. lie's still in his whites, slouching in the chair, planning the wedding. Outdoors. Ilow could he go wrong with a wedding set on a manicured lawn, marigolds and Wacs budding at every tum, the cook in a gazebo waiting for his blushing cashier to step into the sunshine. i\ whiff of cold air slaps the cook and he squints at what's before him. The cashier, is st.mding at the front door with it wide open in the dead of winter talking to Stephi. lie rubs his eyes, but it's all still there. Figures. Now that the cook has the answer, the cashier is busy at the front door acting like the cold air doesn't exist. "Fran, you two talk all night at work," the cook yells from the table. The cook, the cashier and Stephi all work at the same restaurant, but the cashier and Stephi work out front; the cook is in the back. The cook pushes the chair off the f1oor, balancing on two legs. "Tonight's my anniversaty." "Don't you mean our anniversaty?" the cashier asks. They have to be cold standing outside. Stephi will break first because the cook knows how relentlessly his cashier can hold out. The cook has his jacket on and he's shivering. That's why this time the wedding will be in the Spring; no one is happy when they're shivering. The cook has all the answers tonight. The reception will be outside too. lie Cat1 almost hear the toetapping, fmger-snapping music from the five-piece band. "H ey, I'm getting frostbite over here," the cook says. lie drains the last of the soda and shakes the can for more. It's a good night lor a beer. It has been six months, but there's really no reason
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not to have one. "Either in or out, ladies." The cashier leans against the front door and turns her head to the cook. "Don't you have something to clean?" she asks. The cook laughs it off. This moming he cleaned almost the whole place before work. Half the battle in celebrating is being in the right environment. Their big celebration plans consisted of tl1e cook making spaghetti after work. It's all the cashier wanted. She didn't want gifts this year since they've celebrated anniversaries before and money isn't a luxury, but the cook tucked something away in tl1e closet anyway. When the cook and the cashier first started having anniversaries, there was even less money than now, and they both had still wanted gifts, and even sex. Why should tl1is anniversary be any different? Spaghetti, gifts, and sex. "I've got a marriage to celebrate," the cook says. The cashier takes out a cigarette, twirls it between her fmgers. The cook laughs again; she's been smoking all day, why should it matter now? Stephi's voice floats tl1rough the room, but the cashier is blocking the cook's view of the doorway. Stephi works the food line at the restaurant- When the cashier is busy out front, Stephi will go into the kitchen and talk to the cook in the back. They're all good friends, the cook, the cashier, and Stephi, but the cook only wants to share his idea with his cashier. Renewing your vows. He'll tell the cashier happy couples do it all the time. The cashier puffs on her cigarette. "For God's sake," the cook says, watching the cashier exhale smoke. It'll have to get ugly for the cashier to give up cigarettes. "I'm going to freeze to death." The cook knocks over the dining room chair trying to get up. He walks into the kitchen �without picking up the chair. The spot where the cook ran1med his fist into tl1e kitchen vrall always catches his eye. The front door slams shut. The cook is halfway inside the fridge clearing space to fmd the beer or wine coolers he knows aren't there. Not even chan1pagne. The cook mbs his fmger over the spot on the wall. The cook's story was he hit the wall because
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he was drunk. lie had been to the bar beforehand, then on top of the usual drinking with the cashier - it wasn't so much the fight, is how the tale goes, but the conditions. The cashier had said, fme, then we both won't drink. She said it was the perfect answer. "I don't know why things happen to me," Stephi says. The cook turns to tl1e living room where Stephi is standing, sniffmg and shivering witl1 the cashier standing next to her. "Why, God?" Stephi says. "What have I done so wrong?" Stephi's twisting tl1e cross on her necklace back and forth. The cashier flips back her long dark hair and holds Stephi's elbow like she's handicapped as they settle into the couch. The cook picks up the dining room chair with two hands and shoves it into the table, shaking tl1e plastic flower arrangement. "You're screwing the boss," the cook says and takes off his jacket The cashier hits his leg as ilie cook passes to hang his jacket Stephi's mascara is smeared under her eyes. The cook has never seen Stephi upset enough that it jeopardizes her face. "And your point?" the cashier says. "The boss isn'l even the boss, he's an assistant manager. And he's not married." The cook knocks into the coffee table and shakes U1e jigsaw puzzle on top as he heads back to ilie kitchen. lie expects ilie cashier to hit him a second time, but it's not right having a kid's puzzle sitting in a grown-up apartment. "lie's your boss too," Stephi says to the cook. "And he told me his fantasy." IIer eyes roam around the room as if everything is new. "Right in my own bed. We had only been going out for two months." "The boss wants kinky sex," ilie cashier says. She uses the "have a nice meal" tone she gives the customers. "Some fantasy." The cook's in his kitchen opening another soda. Both sides of the counter are littered wiili greasy pans and stained pots, unscraped plates, half-empty cups, silverware covering the sink. IIow can two people do so much dan1age is the question.
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"We're in my bed, right?" Stephi says. ller gaze settles on the pictures above the TV while letting the cashier pull off her gloves. "I'm just wanting a little sex. Then from nowhere he tells me his fantasy is to get as much comfort as possible." The cashier's back straightens like someone dropped ice cubes down her shirt. She places Stephi's gloves on the end of the couch and slides Stephi's jacket off her. "Cheap thrill seekers," the cashier replies. "The boss wants kinky group sex." The cook whispers the word, "comfort," and the image appears - the cashier the morning after the wedding, folded in his arms, her head rising and falling on his chest. Stephi paces in front of the family pictures on the wall, stringing her cross back and forth. "It's not the sex," she says. The cook watches Stephi glance at the pictures on the wall; they're pictures of the cook's family, the cashier's. The cook and cashiers' wedding picture stops Stephi cold. "Before his wife died, it was them and the next door neighbors," Stephi says. "The boss says it's the safest place you'll ever find." The cook Jeans over the sink to study the wedding picture. Him and the cashier got married in the winter, but he can't say why. They had lived together before they married, and the cook can't remember who brought up the idea of marriage first, but there they are, all smiles. "Every man's fantasy is to get as much sex as he can," the cashier says. "Sure, they'll dress it up." The cashier throws her boot in the comer by the TV, breaking Stephi's concentration on the wedding picture. "Comfort. That's pretty creative." "Is that true?" Stephi asks the cook. The cook knows it's his question. Since tllis morning one person or the other has wanted to know either how or why. It's those kinds of questions that the cook has the most trouble with. "You can't blame a man for his fantasies," the cook says. "Can't blame a man for his fantasies," the cashier repeats. The other boot knocks over the stack of newspapers in the comer for
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recycling. The cook flings cmsty macaroni shells into the garbage. There was a time when the cashier's actions made the cook itch. Just simple things like repeating his words and trashing the apartment made his muscles tighten. lie would begin to scratch his arms thinking about how to respond to her. A conversation with the cashier would leave the cook rubbing his neck, stroking his face while he pulled together the right words. Now the cook does housework when the itching begins. This morning he was vacuuming and dusting as tl1e cashier was dressing. lie rammed the vacuum cleaner into tl1e cofTec table and it shook the jigsaw puvJe. "The boss didn't ask me anytl1ing," Stephi says. "lie just told me his fantasy." She turns from the cashier to the cook, waiting for a reaction. "It can't be so wrong. Mter all, he's a professional man, a boss for Christ's sakes. There's no harm in saying things. Right?" The cook plunges his hands in tl1e dishwater and his whole body tingles. A real photographer will take tl1e new wedding picture, instead of his cousin. They'll stand in front of two huge oak trees, stmshine pouring down so you have to squint just looking at the picture. "Fantasies keep you alive," the cook says. The cashier shakes a puzzle piece at the cook. "Blood pumping to your heart keeps you alive. Honey." The cook watches tl1e cashier fit the puzzle piece in. They got the puzzle as something they could do togetller besides drink. She's been telling people at work her puzzle is almost done. !fer puzzle only has about twenty pieces to go. "The boss' fantasy didn't come out sounding dirty," Stephi says. She enters the kitchen, standing behind the cook with her arm around his shoulder. "just in1aginc. I'm lying in bed with the boss, pushing my tits out, holding him in my hand, for God's sake, and he's talking about comfort like he's all alone in the world." Stephi's smell is a blend of fried chicken and discount store
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perfume. The cook's thoughts swirl along with his sponge in the gravy bowl. lie closes his eyes and fmds himself in bed: she tells the cook he is her fantasy and wraps her legs arow1d him. "I can't figure out why I married the cashier in the winter," the cook says to Stephi. "But I got this idea...." The cook can see the cashier wearing a white dress tl1is time with rufl1es and a train so long someone has to carry it "I should let you guys celebrate," Stephi says, and pnnches the cook on the arm. The cook's eyes open to see the cashier in the middle of the living room, pointing the remote at the TV as shows flip by and the stereo blast<>. "After all," Stephi says, and pats the cook on the back, "you're in love." "Get me a beer before you go, Stephi," the cashier says. The cook's eyelids flutter. The warm water rnns over the cook's hands as he rinses the gravy bowl. Tossing her boots, not dumtr ing ashtrays, playing tl1e stereo and TV at tl1e san1e time, and now this asking for a beer. Now this. When they drank, the cook and the cashier always agreed. The cook watches Stephi survey the kitchen walls for some scar that the cook left. When tile cook told the story, he never mentioned to Stcphi which wall he hit. lie said that first, it was going to the bar that pushed him over tl1e top, then, that husbands and wives fight, and finally, about the wall - it was the only thing he wmted to strike. "You've got a funny wife," Stephi says to the cook. "Bottom shelf, left-hand side, behind the prune juice," the cashier hollers from the living room. She's switching radio stations: rock to pop, rap to conntry. "It's my armiversary; I can have a beer. After all, I'm in love." Stephi rummages through tile refrigerator and pulls out a beer. "But I thought you two had an agreement?" she asks the cook. The cook's scratching the back of his leg with his shoe.
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The music stops on the oldies station. "I bet you know everything about us, huh, Stepm?" the casmer asks. Stephi's holding the beer away from her like she does when taking out the garbage at work. She's standing at the edge of the kitchen, ready to go into the living room. "Except those fanta. SICS.
"
The cook snatches the beer out of Stepm's hand as she's almost out of the kitchen and he hands her a dripping wet casserole pan instead. The cook throws Stephi a dishtowel, hitting her in the face. "She's had fantasies, you know," he says. The cook points a soapy finger at the cashier. "She always wanted to do it at work, right under everyone's nose. Our first anniversary, she was still working salads. I'm in the kitchen, walking past the ladies' bathroom when the door opens and she pulls me in. All she's wearing is a long white apron - in the middle of ltmch rush. We could hear people asking where we were." "I thought tills was a celebration," the cashier says. She's on the living room floor, ransacking the CD collection the cook had alphabetized. "It's my anniversary, and I can't even get a drink?" "In the bathroom? That can't be sanitary," Stepm says. She puts the casserole pan in the cupboard and takes a wet plate from the cook. "But I did hear that fantasies are good for your mental health." "Stepm," the cashier says. "I'm really thirsty over here." The cashier's sitting next to the coffee table. "Doing it on the beach was a big one of hers," the cook says. "I told her it's just a lot of sand in uncomfortable areas, but she insisted." I Ie finishes washing everything and cleans out the sink. "Not very original on the fantasy scale, if you ask me." "It's the beginner's fantasy," Stephi says, rubbing the same plate, san1e spot "You start with the basics and build up. Like everythlng else." "Stephi, for Christ's sakes," the cashier says, "I'm dying of thirst." The cashier studies the puzzle like it's a blueprint
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"My boss is pretty original, then," Stephi says to the cook. "Fantasizing about comfort?" The cook watches the cashier light another cigarette, fifth one, but it's only counting now. "lloney, you forgot about one fantasy of mine," the cashier says, sitting on the couch, in front of her puzzle. "The one with the Boss, Stephi, me and the motorcycle neighbor next door." The cook's wiping the counters. It's just a story, the cook's saying to himself, if she really had the fantasy, she'd tell him. Stephi starts walking into the living room, but the cashier points to the beer on the counter and Stephi turns to grab it "Our neighbor and me, and the Boss and you," the cashier says, "we're all in bed together. Doesn't this sound familiar, honey?" she says to the cook. The cook's sweeping. He'll give her the gift, explain the idea, and she'll react then. "I'm thinking it's going to be crowded," the cashier says to Stephi, "pushing and shoving, one person wanting all the attention, the others begging for more." "Where did this come from?" Stephi asks. She hands the beer to the cashier and sits next to her on the couch. The cook's digging in the closet for the gift It's not like the cashier is telling about a dream she had. Aren't fantasies just wishes? "No props or toys. It's your straight from the manual sex," the cashier says. "Naked arms and legs, breasts and thighs, but only more. More fingertips gliding recklessly, lips licking around more terrain, more toes wriggling against more legs so much more pouring out and fumbling over itself that never, at any time, does one fall out of touch." "I know I've told you this one, honey," the cashier says to the cook. "H aven't I ?" The cashier pops her beer open. The cook's standing across from the cashier, holding the gift box, watching the cashier drink her beer. "Your wife asked you a question," Stephi tells the cook. "They're rhetorical questions," the cook responds. lie places
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the box on top of the cashier's puzzle. "They're questions we already know tl1e answers to." "We said no gifts," the cashier says to Stephi, but gets no response from her. ''Why would you ask a question you already know ilie answer to?" Stephi asks. She picks up ilie box and shakes it. "See, you get it," ilie cook says. The cashier takes the box when Stephi hands it to her. "This is how he makes me the bad guy," the cashier says. "I follow the mles." The cashier rips the paper and holds up the gold chain so Stephi can see. "It's beautiful," Stephi says. "It's the real thing, too," the cook says. lie leans over and takes the chain from the cashier, opens the clasp. The cashier stands and turns around. The cook smells the cashier's hair when she swoops it up. "The chain won't tum." "Thank you," the cashier says, then turns back to the cook. She adjusts the necklace and clears the box off the puvJe. "Don't you want to kiss him?" Stephi asks the cashier. The cook wants an answer, but he remembers kissing the cashier's cheek tl1is morning and saying happy anniversary. She seemed awake, tangled in her own blankets, her back to him. H oney, the cook had said, and she rolled over and asked him how they could make love stay. "Stephi asked you a question," ilie cook says to the cashier. "H oney?" The cashier picks up her beer from the table and sips it. The cashier didn't even say good morning. The cook asked what kind of question was that? Why today? lie massaged his scalp, worked his way to his face and mbbed his cheeks in circles. The cook got out of bed and gazed out the window. The cashier had started her shower, leaving the cook alone with her question. ''Where ilie hell did you get that question?" the cook asked ilie cashier through ilie bailiroom door. "Am I supposed to answer iliat?"
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The cook stretches over the living room table to kiss the cashier. Just before he meets her lips, the cashier leans too far back, kicks the coffee table, tipping the puzzle over, then kicks the table harder, knocking it over. The cashier shrieks as the table lands on the puzzle, separating the pieces. "Perfect," the cashier says. The cashier hands Stephi her beer and then falls to the floor, breaking more puzzle pieces apart than she's saving. "Now this." The cook stands and watches the scene. Ilis fingers begin to twitch the same as this morning when he was standing in his bedroom and heard the cashier turn off the shower. lie had turned to the bedroom window. Staring outside, the cook was thinking how things looked nom1al with the kids going to school, parents to work, when the cashier cut off the bathroom radio. She would be coming out of the shower any moment, standing just outside the doorway, fresh and clean, and when the steam cleared, he would have to face her. "I'll be back," the cook says. The cashier's still on the floor salvaging puzzle pieces. The cook grabs his coat and catches a glimpse of the kitchen, shutting the closet door. The whole kitchen sparkles except where the cook left his mark. ~ere could you possibly be going now?" Stephi asks. It's a question. The cook unclenches his hands and places them at his side. "We're going to need more beer. After all, it's a celebration."
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Richard Bendey
Onion Variation - I
This onion is perfectly round, its surface looks crystalline and unafraid. Imprinted with light, smooth sure delight, it smells of frost and fog. What would Mother say? "It's jewelry, dear. Just an ordinary old jewel. Please pick it up." What I never understood about my mother was how eve1 ything that dropped had to be picked up, and why things always kept dropping. H er task, as if assigned from another world and sent here to earth with her...was to pick things up: objects, spirits, hearts. Everything dropped asked for a flexing and unflexing of the knees, thighs and ankles. My genius is to let things drop and watch them rot or ripen on a forest floor, in th e sodden garden weeds or on the dusty-flowered corner of a rug where this onion might show us the future as a tiny monument to staying put.
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Victoria Tolbert
She
She's so cool washed in black Silver sliver of the moon, man Nylon notoriety on the sale rack She's so hip to the pleather diva Sacrificial superficial Naugahyde never was She has this way of clawing up your spine W ith just the right tenderness to make you think You \-vant her there wrapped around your neck I Jer ornam ental orchestration just choking Las palabras right out of you Blue marbles for eyes, she's a blind visionary Tells me she knows all about Sex with deities and prophets She creeps around the garden In the afternoon, lurching Behind the tomato plants She knit a sweater for the president Sits on the sofa waiting to see him wear it She smokes perfumed cigarettes As though the lilacs will save her lungs From the charring She dt;nks licotice liquor Says it clears the brain of cobwebs And inhibitions She shoots up sunshine, freebases mornings Says she has to feel it to see it She's smoked glass, mystetious and fragile lias to say the words to the bed sheets Conjures them to tangle her up, bind her to the night The mouming doves make her cry The futility of their life mating seems A farce to her solitude Blue denim ball gowns lining her closet Never been worn except to tTy the style She's notwhom you might think
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A deja vu doo priestess hauling Chicken bones around in her pockets Night sweats and sunshine coffins She's got a cyclic shaman in her veins I think she used to be a wife, mother Maybe someone's daughter or sister She can't recall, just knows its all familiar All been done again and again since That night she stumbled upon that book on fire Its chaned pages hypnotic to the bored Slits of her eyes seeing nothing Save the words, words rambling in her head Like a train off tracks The neon beacon can't change the course She's gone, I tell you, gone all over
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Amy Eleanor Parker
-First Place PoemThomas Edison Films the Electrocution of an Elephant
Two revolutions per second. Crank crank em eye ess ess crank crank eye ess ess crank crank eye peepy
e~
he count~, keeping calm the camera steady as his wrist moves crank crank steady
A pregnant she-cow: great milky bags. Bedecked in a bridal bridle, a
corselet of cold
filigree. Tungsten bands bound over her globe-filament tracks lor electricity. H er limbic system stands ready. lie plants his tripod, (built, for stability, on the principles of the beanteepee, crowned with the absw�d shutter-and-whirr bean Hower, black bloom, silver pistoned heart), in the mud. Mud sticks to his shoes, b1ickrnak.ing mud his wife will have to clean offgood thing his feet never touch earth -he's a redhead; copper-conducting -a Yankee Prospero, courting Ariel with apertures and moving parts. But this elephant, absurd bag of bmte bone, packed and hinged, head hanging, stands mud deep and dense as mud not courted not courtrnarshaled,
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captive, captured. Shoot. lie winds the scrollable co mea, the vitreous fluid, the long tape of retina - sensitive to light but not sensible - photography's less sight than stenography. What can record her mass, her hide, her blood? Light circuits through the veins in her ambient ears- skin screens of ruby Winng -circuit boards that bring hemoglobin to her hearing and her head (but what device can record the trumpeting blood-rush of the condemned?) lie is concemed with sound, oh yes. All manner of recording, our man of the hour. The secondary act of hearing, the reordering the recoup,
Re
Re Re Re Sings the shutt.er Reeling and re-reeling Sadly, the film lacks sound. These sensory machines have yet to be integrated. So but her breathing, the sonorous bleat, the primal bellow that the circus canvas- dingy, flaccid - cannot catch? In an atmosphere of wax, inscribed, it revolves there still. Re Re Re
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Re Eye ess ess eye ess ess eye peepy eye
This is not an event for stills. lie captures it in revolutions. No one has yet designed a device to record smell; there is only, of course, the brain itself. That is what he is after- this electromagician this- to create working apparati of the mechanical brain. But the enfleurage of memory and smell, the bouquet of ptimal nostalgia - the hippocampus- he does not attempt to produce. Alas! For what a smell of her! The hosegreen pats of matted grass and fluid and bile, carbuncled with peanut shells, laced with banana skin, and if one dared get close enough (mad cow) het� breath herbivorous, yes, sweet She smells of ditt and damp straw. She smells of flaked skin and wet iron. She smells of the ozone-taint of adrenaline, of estrogen, of heavy milk. She smells of dust and excrement She smells of the lion's neighbor. She smells of newspaper and pipe-water. She smells of mildewed canvas and motes. (And later, of cooked hide of crisped hair.) Is smell particle or wave or something that leaves less trace? lie only knows: scent shoots straightPlink. Plink. Drawn upward and etched in the hippocampus. Plink
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Plink
An elephant's memory might derive from its prodigious sense of smell. That delicate hose, that extra hand t11e purifying discemment tube a pipette d istilling the whiff.
Plink.
Clink. H er legs are in irons. They jingle delicately. They draw attention to the delicious hinge of ankle, the deep ruffle of skin, cuffed, barbarian. They jingle delicately. Later, sparks play over iliem -diamond trumpery.
She switches her tail - iliat cord (frayed, electrical) missing its plug, switches it over her rump, where flies settJe, on/ofT. Oh we are all electTical. Oh we are already. Her limbic system stands ready. She courses wiili adrenaline - electrified already currentwise, in chains. And does ilie hair on ilie dome of her head lift at ilie shock of static - iliose glass fibers- iliose metal threads? H er limbic system stands ready. lie examines, through lenses, ilie niblet fingers of her trunk. She looks cool enough to pluck a daisy. Button a baby. Pinch snuff. But: once she hefted a joey, curled her hose around his biped body, curled it
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around the ginsmelling joey (he wore the mffied bonnet of an oversized baby) lifted him, serpentine (for she is also anaconda, she is tentacle, she is pachyderm python) lifted him (his stmggling bifurcate symmetry) and squeezed and curled and squeezed. (dumbstl1lck the strongman dropped his dumbbells and plucked at his lionskin) Freeze. The joey cracked. She set him down and trod on his stomach, delicately. Expressed gin and bile, a stomped grape. Handlers la:riatt;d her with chains. She struggled graciously. F1�eeze. Legs in irons. They dangle gingerly. Why not just shoot her? Part malice. Part curiosity. Elephant~ are primitive as bullets- explosive, mde, noisy- less novel, less novel than electricity. lie uncaps the lens. The iron bands on her head fom1 ajuliet's-cap. H e zooms on her eyelashes. Steady. She blinks - vulnerable, curly, almost coquettish from this close up. Zoom . Steady. Iler lashes stand out, individual as feathers. Fanned incongmities on that pink and grey head, that lumber-skull, that cumbrous body. Newfangled, he shoots her. The executioner throws the switch.
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Inside a bulb's blown glass envelope, the elecllical current flies. Tigho�ope dancer. Daring young man on the flying o�apeze. Britrle dome diffusing licks. Shell helmet. Crackle-thin. Concealing sparks, radiance flung aside, in capes and sheets. Glass balloon. Fragile answer. And there was light! Oh bulbous, elephantine. Bodies have their bulbs. The moist grey bulb of the medulla. Consider it blinking at the top of her hooked, inoicate spine. Primal bulb of re re re reflex, of motor coordination; the pith that mns the heaJt and lungs of man and beast. The pith into which plunges the firestorm. Lightning dances along the web ofkitesllings, soikes major and minor keys. The hippocampus fuse blows last. Light engraves the motion-fdm. Fleco�icity engraves her memory. A storm of banana light. Blast of nasal brass. An agony. She recalls everything hosing herself down with fragrant dust. With river water neaJ� Chiang Rai. W ith river water, decayed and rich with plankton death, fish piss, her own exudations -yes-she hoses herself down, showering millefleur smells down the slope of her back, her pitched haunches, the hanging pouch of vagina, pout-pink and vacant. She recalls the nettlesome
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sting of the whip, the barb of the tout, she floats down the river, rolling teak, (then the embryo's pitch and toss in her belly as the electricity flags it, umbilical - its seizures deep within her ovm, like another memory) a torTent., a breeze, the death of a nurse-aunt, the impress of a thousandherd feet o n the tracks, the sway of the train and the pull of her chains, the sweaty proffered peanuts, she recalls everything, a mastodon dynasty, a cosmology in the great glass globe - her frazzled tungsten memory. The train winds thr�ough her channels, whistling, blowing Doppler trails of sound and steam. She glows. Iler globe lights up- incandescent her ears throw light like shot silk shades- pink moire. Blinding lamp, scor�ed with sparks. The chains, the br~dal cap, chased gold cun�ent. The camera cranks Re re re re Eye ess css eye es.5 ess Sparks hiss too grand to judder or jig Re Re Re Re just slow, bewildered fall of shorted-out body. Electric lines play over her, wind a net. Chase one anotl1er, touch tag, brief snakes.
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Ft;GCE t/23
The head topples, the neck, the knees, until she lists, charged and luminous. Then crumples with cautious, conciliatory grace, to the end elephantine. Run the film back. Loop the loop. Re Re Re Re -wind -iterate -surrect -verse Rolled back electricity bolts her back upright, galvanized a bride again: celluloid scientists cry She's alive! The reel wheels, relinquishing its thread until the first frame, loose and ticking, keeps time.
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A11der Monson
-First Place StoryOther Electricities
�
My father had moved up in the attic with all the radios and the best connection to the main antenna. lie had gotten a call sign and had begun to shape the air with his voice. You could listen to him in the night. It was good to see him controlling something. Good for him and good for us. The night was filled with him, though you had to tune in right to listen- had to fmd his frequency and call sign, or scan the air for the rhythms of his voice. The night was filled with him upstairs and my brother and I below. You had to have the right equipment. Amps and SWL receivers. Mobile or stationary antennas, encoders/decoders, coax. Circuit boards traced to spec. A couple hundred feet of insulated wire, short wave radios, the code books, FCC licensing manuals. A license to use the language. On the radio, they speak in code. Words that are not words. Words that are words, but not the words you think they are. That displace language. Shift it back and forth like light across a room as the day changes. Charge up the air. Charge right through it. Make it opaque. lie stopped going to work. He told us he had enough money stashed to keep us up for a year. lie kept provisions downstairs and would make excursions down once or twice a night for salty snacks. lie was always up in the night. Radiating some signal of distress. My relationship with him was otT and on, like binary, like square or sawtooth waves. Like a switch. Like digital. Like digitalis. lie was
'\1
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all there or not at all. Days he slept and nights he was up. When I asked, he told me there's better reception at night. More range. Something about clouds. Non-interference from the sun. Non-interference from the kids. ~ IIigh cloud ceilings and reflection off the sphere (which is somehow denser at night) further. Increase your reach. I looked it up. � was saying something about grief, too. 0 Som e need to spread it ouL Pass the news. ~ T hat kid had died a week before. The ; latest in the string of deaths. It was like our ; o father took it personally. It was like those ~ \ k id salways someone else's- were in line for it. Like they had taken numbers and sat in the mall in queues. Getting dnmk or getting dumb or getting ready. You couldn't turn on the news without hearing about it But the anchors related the news with no emotion, no surprise. NotJ1ing to convey their death's importance. You'd see their faces crease more when the DOW went down. The Radio Amateur Is Patriotic. That's what the manual says. It is your responsibility as an amateur radio operator to pass the word in time of trouble, tin1e of war. Time of danger or disaster. Time of distaste. Tin1e of tragic loss. Time of useless death. Time of stupid shit During flood or blizzard. Pass it along, Make everyone aware. This is the Amateur's Code. You need to know it A guy held up the bank downtown in a snowstorm, took hostages, got taken out by sharpshooters through a huge pour of snow. Caused quite a local splash. All over the papers, the broadcast news. Books being composed about it. Murder in the snow. lie kept screaming things about being filled with voices. Conspiracies. The need for someone to listen. lie found his audience. lie had a pirate radio station running somewhere in the area. You could hear him most nights on the low end of the FM, around 89.3 until the holdup, hostage-taking, and his death. The Radio Amateur Is Well-Balanced.
z
:1�
o :
Sprin!YSummer 2002
61
�
0
I had got my own scanner and receiver and with my brod1er we would listen for his voice on the radio in the night. We set it up outside in the shack with all the newspapers. We set it up above the words hidden below the grotmd in bags. Below the books that lined the floor. Below the gas line that we knew ran underneath. We hooked up the gasolinepower generator to the radio when the batteries wore down. Batteries wear down. The Radio Amateur Is Attentive. We listened for my father. We always listen for my father. And we listened for who else was there. Another crackpot broadcasting in the night. There were lots of them. Always someone crowmg. It is a life, d1e radio. Increasingly, our father's life. His father before him had the big old ones with barometers built in and vacuum tubes or huge coils. Installed on ferryboats moving across the Straits of Mackinac. Calling out in storms. Transmitting location, distance, weather, orientation. Useful news. We knew he had a call sign. Everyone does. We searched the databases of current and expired and just-about-to-expire call signs for his nan1e. Nights would go like this: Have dinner. Wash the dishes. File away the food. Stoke the fire. Put your hands on the stove to see how hot it is. Don't burn yourself. Make sure the saran wrap-like material over the windows is intact. Check for drafts. Watch your father go upstairs, say goodnight, get dressed & go outside to reconnoiter. Our schedules changed to his. lie wasn't available or as useful as he had been before. Got a cut or an abrasion? Knock on the door on the ceiling that holds the retractable stairs. If he's up, he'll answer. Bactine in the bathroom. Top shelf on the right in the closet. Directions on the box of Band-Aids. How to put them on. How not to
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touch the pad with your fmger because it can get infected. How not to put bacitracin direct upon the cut, but on the Band-Aid. How to keep the disinfectant uninfccted. If he wasn't up, we'd fend for ourselves. Which is not so bad. TV dinners for lunch. Sleep when we want i\. lot of pop. Sugar cereal which we never had when mom was around. We'd just go to the store and put it on our account. Bag it, bring it home. The pitch and squeal of radio just picked up & corning in over the Porcupine Mountains. The hum of lighted dials. Like a nightlight in a certain way. That which emits. H e'd sit in tl1e attic all night. He'd tell us sometimes who he'd talk to-some guy from Norway. What did you talk about, we'd ask, and he would not reply. Not really. just shake his head and say something about transceivers or low-register noise, or bandwidth. Say something about something. We wouldn't say much in return. The Radio Amateur Is Nearly Always Loyal.
One night while he was up top, we took the car. I doubt he noticed. I drove it, gassed it up; we took it down to Paulding, Michigan, home of t11e Paulding light. Which is not a light exactly. Nor anytl1ing exactly. No power source. No explanation. No natural or artificial cause. It is not a hoax. It made Unsolved Mysteries one year. We watched it on tape a while after it aired, copied from someone who had recorded it from TV. You could see the guy. Robert Stack I think. Gesticulating. You go down this road and turn your lights out. You can only drive so far. Several miles down the patll along the power lines into the distance-as far as an eye can follow-lights appear and seem to rock back and forth. My brotller had never been iliere before. This was anotl1er electricity, I told him. Watch iliat tJUng. The plaque said that it is the ghost of ilie miners who died in
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some accident. A likely lie. More likely some anomaly along the power lines- some collection of electrons. Some lovely gathering. Or power gnomes. The lights move down the hill towards where you park. They come pretty close. Some of the kids who live around there and who come tJ1ere all the time told us the lights come right up to the cars and iliat you can see right tJrrough them. Like electric disco balls spinning superfast, so fast they exert gravity or magnetism or some oilier force and cast off alJ the light iliat hits them. Tear the paint off a car. Tear your spare tire off the back. Tear hood ornaments right away. Even take a tie clip off a tie. A cross on a necklace off a neck. Here's the mark to prove it. The Radio Amateur Is Truthful. The regulars each had stories about the light. There was a group of guys who set off wiili walkie talkies and a short wave radio to hunt ilie thing down. If you hunt it, though, someone said, it won't come. This kind of mystery is like a source, a gas or kerosene lamp, a gaspowered or hand-crank electric generator. It gives birth to stories, powers them. My brother was silent tJ1e whole time. Like he is arotmd strangers. Like he is at night. Like he has been since whatever happened-without language, mos1Jy. Armless, quiet. Sometimes words bursting out of him, like Tourelte's. Sometimes his voice in whines and shrieks. Sometimes he's lucid, conversational. I held onto his side for a while in the car, right below the shoulder stump. That's where he likes to be touched and reassured. lie was wondering about Dad. I could tell by his expression, by his look of emptiness, by the way he held his cheek to the car glass. I had a list I had printed out of dead call signs. We examined it.
0 N9AEP
WII2AEX WD8AFZ
KB2AU KB5ASU
NV5B
WB5BBF
64
TRACY A MONSON ERIC I I MONSON .JOI IN F SIMONSON JOliN R SIMONSON DAVID M SIMONSON ROGER N SIMONSON MARY G EDMONSON
FCGLr: #23
K,J5BP
WD8BVO KAOBZV KI(J KB7CVT NODAPDE
WB5DBF
N2DEII K9DGK N2EMV K7DRZE
RONALD E EDMONSON ROBERT R SIMONSON DONALD L SIMONSON JR ROBERT J EDMONSON LAURA L MONSON ETTE L MONSON TIIOMASJ EDMONSON jOHN A MONSON DARWIN T OSMONSON MARVIN W SIMONSON DON SIMMONSON
You couldn't tell much from the numbers or the names. We were solemn as if actually in a graveyard at night among the steam, stones, and plastic flowers. I didn't know if you even had to have your real name to register a call sign. Or how you do it. Who you register it with. The FCC? Some government commission? How much it costs. Whom to make the check out to. How long you get them for. Whether you can request a sign or do you have to take tl1e one you're given. The Radio Amateur Is Curious About Things lie Does Not Know. The Radio Amateur Is Cautious, Too. The light didn't come up to us. It didn't tear the hubcaps ofT the car, send us wailing. We went home sort of awed and disappointed. The drive to Paulding is just over an hour. We stopped at. the only gas station in Bruce Crossing on the way back. I t was filled with fluorescent. lights. Drinks in display cases. Some pastries wrapped in wax paper. Suspect sandwiches in a row. Various jerkies, beef and venison. Spicy and medium and mild. Cappuccino resembling cocoa. A hundred brands of cigarettes. Some guys reclining in there, chew packed in cheeks, breath rough and loud. The Radio Amateur Does Not Use Drugs. This Includes Tobacco. Dad was still up when we got back. You could tell by the light at the top of tlle house. Lke the belltower in a church. Like Paul Revere. Like
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the strobe light up in the bridge to keep planes from ramming into it We had filled the gas back up to where it was. Exact. Reset the trip odometer at the right time so the miles line up right in case Dad wanted to take the car. Checked the oil like we had seen him do. I held the dipstick up to my brother's face. lie smiled and it was fme. Black and thick. On the kitchen table we found some bits of further evidence. Printed out on a dot matrix printer-you could tell by the banding on the text. We didn't have a dot matrix printer, as far as I knew:
NOMWS 1999-04-{)2 NONFM 1999.04-{)2 NONFR 1999-04-{)2 NONFS 1999-04-{)2 NONFV 1999.04-{)2 NONFW 1999.04-{)2 NONFX 1999.04-{)2 NONGI 1999.04-{)2 NONGC 1999.04-{)2 FRED C. GEBIIART,JR, TOPEKA, KS ELIZABETI I A. LUNDSTEN, I IASTINGS, MN PAUL A. TELEGA, DULUTH, MN DAVID T. GALE, SHOREWOOD, MN JEFFREY D. WILDE, SPRING LAKE PARK, MN LARRY D. WILLIAMS, COFFEYVILLE, KS ALTI lEA C. FARICY, MINNEAPOLIS, MN GERALD LSI IEPI IERDJR, CEDAR RAPIDS, lA ALEX D. BRAY, LAMAR, CO
Look at that list. Like some litany of expirations. A register of those who voted for the wrong party. Landholders. A hit list. Amputation patients. Absentee parents. Those held in contempt of court. Those with past-date dues or bills that had gone too long unpaid. The Radio Amateur Is Knowledgeable. Where does the power come in from? Generators, power plants, batteries. UPPCO: The Up� .I �� per penmswa Power Company. Tl1rougI1 th e 1�mes ~ � eo � we have been told not to touch. Through the lines we have been strictJy told not to touch, not for any reason. Through the lines we were instmcted not to cut, even while wearing ntbber gloves, even with large
~ ~
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f
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wire cutters with an insulated handle. The lines that come down in ice or heavy wind storms and twist across the road, stopping traffic in both directions. The lines that come alive. Look what electricity can do. The lines that hiss like snakes and beckon us to pick them up. The lines that speak to my brother. The lines you can see reflected in his eyes. lines that attract us like anything that can kill.
I know about the phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice, his name, his call sign come across our receiver, we would give up and go out in the snow around the neighborhood with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others' conversations. There's something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors, debtors. I would hold the phone for my brother while he liste ned. H e'd whistle when something good was going on, or something nasty. The Radio Amateur, H owever, Is Not A Voyeur, However It Might Seem. All you have to do is find the junction box on the back of a house, or a larger junction box out by the road underneath the power lines which we were never allowed to touch. Open it up and clip in to a tough discu~sion, to a life. You could make calls too, which we did sometimes. But not often because we could call from home. And who would we call? I talked to the FCC to fmd out who I'd have to talk to in order to get a han1 radio call sign. They gave me another number. Everything is pumed to a number. Everything is handled by a tone. Some stations just broadcast numbers. The key to some code. Something of national importance. They bean1 strean1s of digits into the night No other programming. No anger. No malice. No bereavement Curiosity. Politics. Love. The Radio Amateur Is Sometimes Nosy.
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We would take down messages and numbers. We would write down frequencies of tones we found on the Internet We would go through trash out back of the Michigan Bell facility for manuals and pages of codes and notes. Diagran1s. Schematics. We accumulated quite a stash of operating instructions for phone equipment We stacked them in the shed with the rotting paper on the floor, with the words hidden below the floor in bags. We surrounded ourselves in them. They were warm when left alone, like compost They were warm when touched or burned.
Yellow light from streetlights filters down through snow. Or snow filters down through streetlight light. It's hard to tell which. One is moving, one is still. My brother and I are using my pellet gun to shoot out lightbulbs installed in motion detector lights on people's stairways. The Radio Amateur Is Adept Witl1 Guns. It is good to walk through snow, to let it alight on your face as you turn it up to the patterns in the sky. You can stretch out your tongue like a lizard and wait for flakes, but leaving your eyes open and allowing snow to melt on your cornea-getting bigger and bigger, you'd think, though snowflakes don't fall directly down; they shift from side to side and you can never just watch one come in; it's more like a frigid ambush when they get you-is what really marks you as being serious about sensation. The Radio Amateur Values Sensation. The Radio Amateur Is Friendly. A plow comes slowly by with its lights whirling on top. We wave it down and he stops lor us. The plown1en usually grin ar1d let us in. They don't have so much to do. They make good money plowing the roads in the early morning, or whenever they are called to duty. But it is dull, I tl1ink. They arc lonely mostly. They like company and conversation. Ilot coffee, or too-sweet cappuccino that tastes like cocoa. lie's wearing latex gloves. lie's listening to music-some old AC/
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DC: Who Made Who-on a boombox with a fading battery. It goes in and out while my armless brother holds it on his lap. He wants to know where we're from or where we're going. Which is nowhere. We are out walking. Our dad is upstairs in the house with the lights off surrounded by radio equipment. It's hard to come out with this, though. I point to my pellet gun. lie nods as if he understands. My brother nods, too. We are brothers. We are in tandem. We share secrets, cans of pop, the saliva collected in the bottoms of pop cans that makes up a small percentage of the fluid by volume as you reach the end. We share stories and last names. You don't think a lot about the guys who plow the road usually. I mean, you think about the fact that the roads are plowed, and if they're not, you write letters of complaint to the city which are most likely ignored, because if the roads aren't plowed, there's usually a good reason- such as the finite (but large) budget for plowing having been plowed through already due to heavy early winter snow. You don't think about the drivers of the plows, their likes and dislikes, turn-ons, and such unless you ride along with them. Unless you get into cars left unattended in darkness or daylight. You can find out a lot just getting into cars or abandoned machinery. People keep stuff you wouldn't expect under seats. Guns. Money. Building plans. Pornography. Bibles and other books. The Anarchist's Cookbook. Cigarettes are a big one. Liquor in flasks. Ilalf.frozen beers that explode when they open. Love notes and other things scrawled on napkins. Bad lyrics. Lockets. Model rocket engines. Things that might cause grief if found . The Longer The Radio Amateur Thinks o About Things, The More Intricate 0 They Become. "It's not as interesting as it seems, kid," the plowman says, seeing my eyes jumping back and forth. It has a lot of lighted dials and gauges that measure fluid levels, or power. They flicker and dance when the plow jerks forward, their levels momentarily going down or up. "I know. I've been in a few," I say.
..
1
~.
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t/'
...............
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lie doesn't have much to say, which is unusual. You don't have to carry the conversation normally. You just sit alongside. Sit and listen. Listen to the on and off radio. Or the sound of the plow moving over concrete. Maybe a whump if it hits something like a dog or a dnmk. You learn things about people. lie wears a suit and tie. I ask him about it lie says he's got a job interview in a couple hours and he doesn't want to miss it, and what �with the roads like this, he's better off taking the plow to the interview. I nod like I understand. lie asks about my brother and I look to him. H e doesn't answer, really. lie hums low, trying to match the pitch of the machine. It's weird when he's really close to it because you can hear the sound beating back and forth as his pitch approaches the plow's. Then they're right in tune, and then the plowman shifts gears and my brother has to play catch-up. lie gets us a mile and a half down the road before he lets us out I give him the Whatchamacalhi: bar I have in my pocket. The Radio Amateur, As You Know, Is Generous. y lie grins and thanks me. Takes off his latex glove to grab it, shake ' my hand. Offers a hand to my brother but there's awkwardness ac; we pause and he retracts his hand. His face is odd in the light that comes on when we open the door. W e get out and our breath looses itself into the air. The plow moves down the road, burying a GMC pickup truck in a driveway. I wonder about those latex gloves. W e make sounds with our throat, pretend we're dragons. The Radio Amateur Is Meticulous About Appearing Ilygenic. It is later and I am telling my brother about how I only fake wash my hands most of the time. Leave the water running long enough and divert its stream so if someone wc:tS listening, it would seem like you're doing iL W et the soap on the top and the bottom so it looks like it's used. Always leave your hands wet in case someone checks them to see if they're washed. The Radio Amateur Is Cunning. The Radio Amateur Will Not Be Found Out
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Fl.:Gt:E #23
The Radio Amateur Remembers When lie Was Young, Right Before Ilis Brother Was Born, Ilow Ile'd Ilave To Be Driven Around In The Old Ford Fairmont Before He'd Sleep, And Even After That Car Was Long Dead And I lis Brother Was Alive And Without Arms, Ile'd Ilave To Rock Himself Side-to-Side To Conjure Sleep. The Radio Amateur Remembers That Back-and-Forth. Like The Sea Or Static. That Lovely Oscillation. That Necessary Motion. The Radio Amateur Wonders Ilow Anything Ilolds Together. We get back to the house and the lights are still off. We check some frequencies in the shed to see if Dad's still broadcasting. It's hard to figure out what they're saying out there. It's mostly vos and Zebras and nummundane stuff peppered in with Brabers tossed around like they must mean something. I think of things I'd like to tell him if only we had it setup to speak. But that equipment is much more expensive. Listening is cheap, nearly free. There's a voice talking about the recent winter death. Probably he must be from around here. Ilis name-he says it, unlike manyis Louie Koepel, from Lake Linden-Hubbell. It is such a tragedy. When will these kids ever learn. Was he dnmk? I trunk he must have been. Doesn't it all come down to morals, fanlilyvalues? Doesn't it come down to parents ruling with an iron fist? Didn't the kid know not to go out on the ice? Didn't he see it comillg? The Radio Amateur Is Not Presumptuous. The Radio Amateur Does Not Presume To Know Or Legislate Belief. Maybe he rud see it coming, I say-though not on the air, since we don't have broadcasting equipment just yet-Maybe he wanted it to come. Maybe he waited his whole life for something and it didn't
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come, so this was just as good to him. Maybe he knew just as you do that when the day is overcast, the day is warmer. The blackest ice is the thinnest. There are reasons to want to die. To want out of it. Maybe he felt some pressure. Ilow do you know, I say, how do you know anything, you old ham fuck. The Radio Amateur Is Empathetic. The Radio Amateur Is Emphatic. The Radio Amateur H olds Ilis Position If lie's Sure It's Right. The Radio Amateur Protects Ilis Brother At All Costs. I know that nothing will bring the kid back, should he want to come back at all. I know that I am not speaking to Mr. Koepel as if on the phone, nor listening to his private conversation. I doubt my words would have any more effect on him. But I think of putting a rock through his window, if only I learned where he lived. It would be nice to be able to say it, to shove it in his face. The Radio Amateur Knows Which Words To Say And Whjch To Keep In Bags For later Use. The Radio Amateur Knows Where Power Comes From And What It's Good For. The Radio Amateur Knows That Power Used Is Power Lost. The Radio Amateur Understands Needing To Know So Bad That You're Willing To Take It Home All The Way Through The Ice And See Where That Gets You. The Radio Amateur Knows Enough To Not Reveal Or Hide Himself Away Too Long. The Radio Amateur Is Not His Father. The Radio Amateur Knows To 'Go To Bed When The Sun Comes Up. ao~------�oo
't
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Ft.;GL"E #23
Gina Tr1basso
My Mothe r
is a crow who picks up stnnds of silver tinsel, who is attracted to what is pretty and shiny. She covers herself witJ1 diamonds and oilier stones, wiili rings, eaHings, bracelets and necklaces, only made of gold. She lives on tJ1e surface and deals wiili tJ1ings by pretending tJ1ey don't exist, and by believing in ilie will of ilie Lord. She sees a painting of a woman but just notices her doilies, not ilie agony in her eyes or ilie growling dog at her feet.
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Christian I I orlick
Ariel
Dark rooms contemplate their silence. A lamp arcing over the couch asks No meaning from histo�-y. Forget this tormentofknick-knacks Rearranging themselves o n d1�essers, in closets: This house is sure I'll die. The world is constantly a new tl1ing. Now, I am No longer an arrow at the threshold of an apple, But a hunch of periphery restoring order Without evidence tl1at love is not our bodies. It never was. The st01m that brought you here, In the fu�st place, was my doing. I made the clouds and the threats.
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Fl:Gt:E 1123
Pamela Yenser
-Third Place PoemOn the Road with Howdy Doody
D eath Valley. Say it again, Sam. Death Valley. Debt Debt Debt. It's 195 1-yearofthe black lincoln and Father's gangrenous appendix. For me and my little retarded brother childhood was a pink California stucco and a couple of aces clothes-pitmed to our spokes plakp/;tk down Coldbrook. Cooped up like hot dogs or gangsters, we made Kansas in four long days, each sunrise a warm punch in the face. No more dancing. No m ore books, cards, movies, records, sips of beer, H op Along Cassidy, or H owdy D oody. My Old TesG1ment Tales are no help. W e're going to hell. Are we there yet?
Wha-cbeat-a, air capital of the Cherokee. I practice the magic of brand new names. The water is boiling in my cloth canteen. Its cool metal cap and chain comfort m e. Wichita. Say it for me, Sam. Wltcb. Witch We're taking my talkless brother downtown to the h1stant Tmd1ofLogopedies... or som ething in that neighborhood. We might as well be abducting him to o uter space. This is Father's mission. Mother just \Vants to pray in tongues, but Father invents schemes and ideas for things that can fly without wings. lie tapes them into circles of vellum or al-u-min-ium. Say it Urn. Urn. Urn.
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Ellen Wbeale
Letter to My Younger Self
Always you are there. Las Olas noon traffic wavers in the heat as you write your fmallist at the cai! table, rattle ofjacaranda, bleached-out sky. I am here, here, here. Rain cloudsjeweling my office window on the Is� floor and what you long for at my feet- city of vapor, skyscrapers electrum, bridges emerging out of the clouds. You called Florida a desert land, ;mole lizards and xeroscapes, s!lange paradise spiked pink with heat light11ing. It parched your throat, you said. Every time the song at the cafe ends, s!l-ap yow� busted car door and set off 1,400 miles for what bones remember. 1l1at Northern light falling silvery cold as milk.
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Fl.;Gt;E #23
Tora Triolo
The Small Detail of Things
I Granada sniffed the air. His ears tipped forward, propped. I stood above him. My arms looped his neck, but before I could reach my face down to give his muzzle a kiss, he was gone. lie shot through my arms with rockets under his feet. "Granada!" I called after him. "Granada! Granada get back here!" I started to whistle. The wind got lost in a low hun1. "Shit," I said out loud. No one around to shrug my shoulders at in a sigh. I walked back to tile van. I stubbed my toes in a jolting rhythm. The parking lot vacant, except for my fifteen foot Budget rental van. I had parked it under the one installed streetlight. "Here we go," I said under my breath. Call of the Wild. A girl and her dog. "Darrm it, Granada! Why are you a dog at the most inconvenient times?" I slid the door open and reached for my backpack and groped in the half light of tile inside of the van. Muttered, ''Why? Why did I get off this exit? Where the hell is Cedar Creek in relevance to any object? Kansas. Three clicks of a heel. This isn't Idaho anymore, Granada." I slid the door closed. "Granada," I yelled. I did the usual high pitch, low pitch, you're in trouble, please come home whistle in between my teeth. Nothing. I kept a straight walk without a horizon in sight, just the back light of tile street lamp guarding my transient home. The air felt damp in my nose, and I sneezed. My palm was cool against the red metal of my flashlight. I picked up my pace, bumped my toes against the rocks in my path. The light beam jiggled back and fortl1 between a straight line and a curve. My breath quickened. Nothing. I stopped and listened to empty air. 'Granada! Come on! I am tired and want to sleep. I am sorry you have been in the van all day! Pleeeaaassse."
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Nothing. I could not fmd my direction in the field. I looked back at tl1e van, the street lan1p, gas pumps and closed Texaco. I had originally pulled ofr the highway to let Granada and myself stretch, get caffeine and some fresh air. I knew I was run down. I needed sleep. When I saw the Texaco sign, red and bright, I got off. I discovered that Cedar Creek, Kansas, is a suburban community waiting to burst. It has a plan centered around a golf course. When you thrive on obstacle in your line of sight, travel from west to east is difficult. Sometimes the only thing you see on a stretch is an overpass. You get oir the highway and take a left switch back into the rolling plains. The road stretches wide in front of you, well-lit and leading somewhere. The Texaco was a left after the tmderpass. It was deserted. "Shit. Ok. I was driving northwest. Actually, yal1. Ok, I was." Lost in Kansas. I gave up looking for a direction and just kept heading in what felt like north and was the direction I remembered Granada bolting from and into the darkness.
Memory 1. lie told me ola father and son driving ofT d1e reservation pulhi1g over to fix a flat. The lather k1lled his son, leaving luin by the roadside with holes 1i1 his face. The claw marks olan enemy. The man wa.lked back toward the reservation and l:nd doWTJ in a field. The next mormi1g he wepl bes1de his son'S body only to remember the sound olthe wind as it crowded in his head.
2. The moon in the J emez Mow1La.ins glows periwinkle, and I
close one eye to shill above my head d1e silhouette oltrees. My eye opens between my fingers like an aperi:ZJie, slow. I leave the lens open lor a blurred pcrcepDon ol dus image, perhaps best reflected in a pinhole, poking d1e sky with a needle, reflecDi1g 1ight wid1 Diifoil. h1 color tlus would look 1ike periWinkle, pers1n1mon and bl-1ck; wid1 color it would glow white, dus
78
moon.
II I was about to stop and head back to the van. Dogs come back. I just didn't want him to find his way back to the highway. I could picture his eyes reflecting in the headlights. llis identity tags throwing bean1s of light not seen. I kept forward. "Granada!! Grrraaaannnnddddaaa!!!!!! NOW!" My voice neared hysteria. I looked up at the sky. Venus. No moon. No stars. The air rested black around me. I stopped, shifted my weight. Listened. Waited. I gave him until two hundred Mississippi before I would head back to the van. I sent light beams to the sky at about eleven Mississippi when I heard the yelp. "Granada," I yelled and turned toward the noise. It was piercing. Not the yelp he used when he had a squirrel up a tree or a prairie dog cornered. That was a yelp of not understanding. This was a yelp full of hurt. "Granada!" I kept yelling and running toward the yelp. The yelp came in waves of three and resounded at the edge of the damp air. I started to run. My feet lifted over the ground and then landed solid. The grass becan1e as high as wheat, long and sharp. The coarse stalks cut at my legs. I beg-d.l1 to make out a cluster. Each step led me closer to the shape, which began to reveal itself as a tree, leafless and still. Each step led me closer to Granada's yelp. The bean1 of the flashlight bounced between earth and sky. Lassie, come home.
Reverse "No," I said loudly into the phone receiver. "A kinetic rail system would never work." ''Why not?" Time replied. lie sounded astonished. No, disheartened. Time was stmggling with his final project for school. An architect overcome with a passion for the ideal. "Accidents," I said. My response short and to the point. I had been cooking dinner when Time called from the studio for
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support. I hated to be the one to break it to him that the world was not as linear as he believed. "I low will you prevent accidents? Think about safety." I reached my arm above the refrigerator, searched for a bottle of wine, stirred my vegetables. My bare feet suctioned to tJ1e linoleum. "My house is filthy," I said. "Accidents. There will be no accidents." But there would be accidents. I could see bodies tense and pressed up against one another, pushed in a forward direction. Energy would push itself out of one body and into the person in front of tJ1em, next to them, behind them. It would leap from skin to skin until no one would remember what stop was their stop, what house WdS tJ1eir house, what memory was their memory. Tense and forward. The railroad car would blur the morning's visuals. Suddenly, the breaking poinL Somebody would sneeze or worse yet, scream and the car would jump its course. Maybe it would stop dead. Either way it would be a long commute. "Do you think about other people? Not everyone believes in what you believe. Not everyone believes that the chaos U1eory is a positive adventure for mankind. Not everyone wants to work toget11er for one great cause." I gmmbled, was cranky, hungry, blood sugar dropped below my knee caps. The most beautiful idea in ilie world and I was jealous.
Memory 1. The most beauti!iii Idea 1i1 the world I sat in the alley to study the bnes of Time's rail system. I sal on Lop ofa couple of stacked pallets Jell over from the Moscow Times mormng delivery. I h;1d pulled d1e crales to the moud1 of the alley and looked out onto d1e smaller grain elevator tl1at T!ine was converting Into an arlisl's commune. Silos turned IiJto lofts, barns turned Jnlo studios. Overhead the power lines attached d1emselves to poles and wdiked each block until they reached the horizon. Granada sniffed the dumpsters.
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2. !lis body moves around me heavenly as I pull stars out ofhis eyes and place them in my ha.iJ: I can feel d1e rotation ofthe eard1 in my palm. My body moves arow1d in the dirt WJiJJ his bod~ moon shine coming out of our mout11s, sighs struck by the movement of our hands. The moon is a heavenly body d1at revolves arozmd the earth. 3. Tinle is scmbbing his angles aw.1y fi-om d1e page. Strings of ink melt zmder the w.1Ler faucet The paper sat:urates and leaves itself clumped in the drain.
III
When I could make out Granada's shape, his head was down. He was trying to pull something out of his coat. I was moving quick when I approached him, and he cowered. Each time his head bent down he yelped. "Porcupine," I said to the air. I was close enough to Granada to see the pain of the embedded barbs, which had swollen themselves in the muscle. Granada shook his head, trying to release the oversized whiskers. Ilis yelp had become a whimper. lie didn't want to be touched, but he wanted the quills removed. I dropped to my knees to meet his muzzle. "Easy boy, let me check this out Sssshhh." I looked him over. Mostly the quills were in his face, a few on each front leg. I Ie must have nuzzled up against it Poked either in attack or curiosity. I sat down next to him, cooed. I eased him a little. I knew I didn't have enough light. I pulled quills from Granada's face until I could see the blood trickle like a tributary into the flashlight's small pool of light. My first aid book said to pour hydrogen peroxide over the wounds and allow the dog to lick his own. A wounded dog is a martyr. Reverse "No," Time said. "I'm not going to change the rail system. I don't care if I have to prove it to tl1em or not, I won't change
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my project." lie was sitting at his draft table. Granada asleep below his feet. IIis bread1 came out in rhythms of fluttering fur. I have never figured out all of his mix only that he swam like a lab, was stubborn like a husky and looked like a shepherd. All of this and his fur went black into a widow's peak, which, at that moment under the fluorescent light, was the same color as Time's. "Rebel," I said. I was on the floor of his cubicle, my back against the wall. My legs outstretched, trying to be motionless in the summer heat. How did this start? "IIow did this start?" I asked. "It doesn't matter." lie packed up his supplies so that we would not miss happy hour. lie swung himself out of his chair, pulled me up. We walked toward the open air, blue sky, green grass, cold beer. Granada kept pace on his own path. Memory 1. On my way to campus I got caught 1i1 a rain shower. Down pour. I cut through the grai11 elevator looking !Or overhead protec/Jon. I saw an open doorway. I jumped up like I was stealin g mto a boxcar and slopped dead. lluge metal tubes of prlliJa.ry colors were stacked in uncoordinated rows. The barn floor was damp and swollen from the rain and smel ed like rust l and bird shit The ra1i1 poured ofT mclal sheets and shd downward mto the earth. With my back Lzuncd away from the door, I straddled one of the tubes, opened my sketchbook, and waited. 2. The energy of the earth moves m heavenly bodies. The energy walks its way up my legs and 1nto my belly. The body of my body spms pen.Winkle and 1i1Lo d1e eye of d1e moon. I am half-way to lilbiJg up on sleep. I can feel my body moving around the dirt Wiih his body, struck by d1e movement of d1e eartil. I can feel d1e body IiJSJde my body. 3. The clumps of1i1k are taken and thrown against the wall.
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Mounds are pressed against the window w1Lil tl1ey stick. The d1y edges Jade into cyan.
IV
I walked to the open field after my task was done and puked. My body warmed with adrenaline. I drdJlk a beer leftover from my farewell party. I know I did not dream. What would be the point of the story if it was only a dream? Maybe I had a vision. Even this is questionable. My head fUled up with imagination. What did I know but ignorance and lost identity? Thinking my dog would bleed himself to death, I did not flinch. R ever se "No. I don't care about who you are. I care about what you represent," Time said. Rolled over, put his feet on the floor. Arms outstretched for clothes. Left them on the floor and laid back down. "No. I don't care about what you represent I care about who you are," I said. Repeated what Time said. Rolled over, put my feet on the ground. Arms outstretched for clothes. Left them on the floor <md walked out the door. "I care about who you are," Time said. Scuffed the floor with his bare feet. Moved behind me toward the doorway. "No," I said to his body behind me. My arms outstretched. ''What you represent," Time said. Caught my arm, turned me around. His am1s stretched in a heart shape. "Represent who you are," I said with arms outstretched. My hand smacked his cheek. I walked out and shut the door. Memory 1. Time was sit1Ji1g in the bar. I walked up to him ;md saJd something like "I rented a truck. It doesn't matter if I come back. I don't Wdlll to finish what I started." I turned on my heel ;md walked out Into the alley. I walked the power lines all the
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w.1y home. Granada asleep on tl1e front pord1.
2. I pull stars out ofhis eyes aJJd hold d1em 1i1 my palm.
Pcrimi1kle ;wd persimmon. llcavcn/y body cil-chiJg t}Jc carlA liJ-0 bump mlo and back out of one body to d1e next body, like heavenly bodies circhiJg llJC C<lrllJ, skill to skin.
3. It is m1possible to measure tlJC print of Time. Cons/J7Jcted m motion, the print wiD fall out ofhi1e, and we wJJ! be /eli to seek shelter 1i1 each otl1er's bodies.
v
I ran down the alleyway faster and faster until I stopped in tJ1e streeL I panted. I looked behind me. Time waved. I started to run again. Time pedaled down the alley faster and faster tmtil he disappeared into the horizon. lie did not look back. Motion produced by motion. Motion produced by fear. Motion produced by motion. Motion produced by fear. Fear produced by motion. I ran faster and faster w1til I reached the Budget rental truck office.
VI I found my pliers in a crate at the back of the van. They were under Time's .scrapped blueprints. I cut the qui Us back. I yanked. Granada yelped. I yanked. Granada yelped. I yanked. Granada stood with his head high and sniffed t11e air. Ilis paws were sturdy against ilie earth. The wind picked up Ute dirt around us. The dirt landed in our eyes and against our skin. Granada stood taller ilian I have ever seen him stand, still against wind. I poured hydrogen peroxide over the open wounds. Granada sniffed ilie air and shot tl1rough my arms so fast I couldn't catch him.
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EM. Schorb
The Crow and the Scarecrow
The only motion of the scarecrow happens when th e crow lands on it and takes off from it The only voice of the scarecrow is the caw of the crow. The rags of th e scarecrow lift in the breeze: sometimes he seems to be waving his empty sleeves, but his arms are stiff as a broom handle. lie walks the field in place all day, all night, climbing the same slope, the crow on his shoulder or overhead, watching wid1 his telescopic eyes. It is thought that the crow brings him food and water, but that is nonsense. But it is known that the crow steals food from ilie windows of nearby farms. It is known that the crow has flown over a farmer's head wiili food hanging from its talons, and ilie farmer has told others that the crow took ilie food to ilie scarecrow. The fanner tells how he followed one day and saw the crow trying to feed ilie scarecrow. Caw, said ilie crow. 1l1e fanner claims to have heard this himself, and to have seen the scarecrow eat 1l1e fanner told his wife about ilie crow and the scarecrow and she placed a pie on her window sill for ilie crow to steal; and, sure enough, d1e crow stole ilie pie, and the farmer and his wife followed ilie crow to ilie scarecrow and watched as the bird fed him. They watched wiili ilieir own eyes as the scarecrow grew fat. Then the crow swooped down at them and they ran to their neighbors to tell what happened. Soon the whole village knew about the crow and the scarecrow, and the men went out to hunt the crow, but he flew out of their range of fire. Then ilie fanners set fire to ilie scarecrow, and ilie crow flew away and never returned. Anyway, d1is is the story the farmer told me over a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.
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Margaret Walther
Mask of the Owl (Easter, 1998)
Think of an owl, feathers tom ofT from nying to escape a skimpy glass enclosw�e. That was reality in the sixties in a fly-by-night roadside zoo, and I still remember the way the naked bird-body n�embled, eyes gazing through me tenantless, like my father's now, as he st.ares at his fork, his knife, Dying to recall how one should eat.
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Sean Lovelace
Crow Hunting Wednesdays seem a day to reflect. A day for gentler things. It's their personality-the misshapen nature, the hump, the way a Wednesday morning feels like the last sip of home-brewed beer. Silty. Wednesdays were a kind of holiday. My crow htmting day. With a high-step past the dozing mower, I approached my crow hunting shed. Scattered around tl1e shed were rows of sprouting trees, mostly pine. Bending down, I snapped off a twig and sniffed its sweet odor. Crisp, uplifting, and green. I could easily inhale the odor of pine all day. But this was Wednesday, so I turned to the shed's padlock. It was a copper lock and to open it you had to sigh into a tiny hole in its center. I sighed and stepped inside. I collected my art supplies and my owl decoys and several calls, the tubes dangling from their braided ropes. I wore the calls proudly, as necklaces. I had three specific calls to lure crows my way. 1. The "We're fighting the owl-of:Owls over here" call. 2. The "We're feeding like politicians on parade over here" call. 3. The death call. Crows are social beings, and extremely intelligent. Here's how I hunted them: I climbed bamboo trees until they bent in half and I rode them to the ground like a pole vaulter, only in reverse. I placed owl decoys atop the trees and let them f1ing back upright. They looked like Christmas tree angels. I got my sketch pad and a six pack of home-brewed beer and hid beneath a cathedral of can1o netting. Then I called.
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My first call said, "Bnttc horror and talons and act, oh, air, hate, plume- attack! A great homed owl eating eggs. Making omelets. Making eggnog, touch of nutmeg. With the feathers of our brood, making flapjacks." My second call said, "Rolling level underneath, combine shudders, com popping nuggets of gold. Gold! Earrings of gold have fallen from the com's ear - combine shudders!" Pleasantly sipping my beer, I knelt in the high weeds and looked into lhc sky. It was full of douds and one of the clouds resembled Alaska, I mean in shape not size. A crow appeared above Prince William's Sound, gliding into Anchorage, veering north toward Mount McKinley. It was the scout crow so I had two options. 1. Let it pass, since a scout crow, unless sketched perfectly, will warn tl1e entire flock of a human's presence. 2. Sketch it perfectly. I let the crow pass. And tl1e flock appeared, attacking the owl decoys, ripping into their synthetic souls. Then sensing the owl's plasticity, the crows ceased their attacking. They floated and perched, cawing, gossiping to one another, and I scribbled along, imagining their tidbits. "Long as my rent gets paid by Sunday." " ... can't be expected to fly under such conditions." "She gave him that kin1ono." " ...a kilo of flTSt class New Orleans seed." " ...tmder apple trees by the river." For several hundred minutes, I made my careful drawings. The tip of my pencil wore down and evenlllally passed away. I set the pencil down and drank my beer, and watched the crows. One crow cawing, simply cawing. One crow off by itself, sharpening its beak on a clotJ1esline pole, reminiscing of a plum it dropped over West Virginia. Two crows bobbing in rhythm on a pine bough. One crow doing aerial eights, while another cuts through tl1e loops, creating its own eight, then another, linking together, sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two ...
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Manrelous, my beer-soaked mind thought, borrowing my mouth to whisper, "Marvelous." Once the crows detect a human - once alarmed and on their way - you use the death call. It sounds like rippling of bones around them .... It says, "I'm dying, right now, and will you help me?" As true as Wednesday, the crows reappear, and you get that fmal image, spiraling frame, buckling of wings and heart, the curvature of retuming. But I never use the death call.
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Elizabeth B. Thomas
from Sonnets on the Sublime
III. Underwater
For years before asthma was diagnosed, I used to love to play a game with air hoarding it first, swimming the length of pool clutching my underwater purse, its pink balloon bulging a tightness in my throat until I touched the other side. And then I'd float learning to lose air, give it up with calculated ease. In the deep end I'd let the soft umbrella of my lungs unfold, slowly collapse and then begin to tow a watery pulse around a spine tighter than air: a breathless pole of light I saw each time I looked up at the house of our 1ich neighbors - blun�ed, mysterious.
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Ander Monson
-Second Place PoemEverything Has Two Uses
The matches are kept waxed in the matchbox slit from the heart of a cedar to protect them from moisture. Gears are stars when you frnd them in the bam wreck pressed into the soil, slick with black butter like WD-40, a silo can that eases joints, ignites. I find eggshell remains prese1 ved beneath a beam. B ow did these thin shims keep so long being made to shed and break? Now they house a caterpillar who comes at me bristle-fierce. Saltpeter is dynamite's chief component. Taken orally, it kills your sex. Lite Brite pins go down the throat and will notlight.Jarts are banned for being too much fun. I have thought that I was only made to end abbreviate the limbs or fins of things and set them spinning in the pool. Matches built into a ricket of a house willjointand, tied, will hold until they rub tip-to-tip then glisten, spark, arise to their best moment: the grace of flame. IIow an antidote becomes an antidote. IIow ether dulls or kills. II ow snow is crystal, complicated by mine, dust, acid, blood.
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NathaiJ Oates
-Second Place StoryOn the Cutting Board It is the third night in a row that Peter has come around banging on my window, banging on the window with a balled up fist and yelling for me to open the door, please opeiJ d1e door./irnmy, I IJeed to talk to you, I really need to talk to you and the whole tin1e I'm trying to watch reruns on NBC. I can imagine him, pressing his face up against the glass, leaving grease smudges, one from his forehead, a smaller one from his nose. It's been raining out again. My mother used to say testosterone is a toxin. My father would look up with his sheepishly sagging face hidden behind the enormous brown frames of his glasses and say, "That's right, we're all pigs," and she would nod. "Slobbering, idiot children," she'd say, pointing her finger at my father and I. Yesterday, after two nights of Peter coming around, I nailed a small, inconspicuous mirror to the tree out in the stone courtyard. I arranged it so that I could get a pretty good view of my door and the small window on the front of my apartment. It took a lot of angling the mirror just right and one of my neighbors, Mrs. Simmons, was watching me, pretending she was watering her pitiful ferns in their red clay pots. This new cheaper apartment I've moved to is in a poorer part of Washington DC, more low slung brick buildings, more leafless branched thin trees poking out of dry gray dirt. Peter is banging around out there like a lunatic because I'd been sleeping with his girlfriend, Claire. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust at the peephole in the door, but now I can see the mirror and then Peter, standing at the window in the leaf scattered courtyard. lie looks, from the peephole distortion, the mirror refraction, like a funhouse image. lie bangs on the win92 FlJGt:"E #23
dow, shouting "Come on Jimmy. Open the door, man. Come on, man. Open it," and his ann seems to get long and thin, then short and fat, over and over. "When Peter moves from the window and starts pounding on the door it echoes, hollow thuds. Eventually he states into the peephole, so we're frozen there for a moment. Peter's already skinny face is made absurd by the lens and my cheek presses against the wood of the door and my breath condenses on the bumpy paint. As soon as I know Peter's gone I go to the phone. Claire answers with a, "Hey," and I say, "lie was just here." "Peter?" Claire says, a<> though it could be someone else. "Yes. Prepare yourself. You're next, I'm sure." I'm looking at my door as I say this, at the peephole's unwavering pinprick of yellow light. I know Claire will let Peter put his ratty sweatshirt in her tumbling dryer, give him aT-shirt to wear. He'll probably end up spending the night over there. Claire has this tone in her voice that's telling me to leave her alone, but I don't want to, because all I can do is mentally track Peter's progress to her place. Peter is probably in a cab on his way over there, wheels tearing open puddles. H e'll be at Claire's and she'll let him in. Maybe he'll weep into her goddamn bosom. "So what are you going to do?" I say to Claire. "Jimmy," she says slowly and it sounds like she's almost going to say something else, but then it's just, "I don't know." I try to picture her, but now she's gotten her hair cut in a tapered bob that I've only seen once and it throws me off. I like the image of Peter in the rain, like a swooping crane shot in a ftlm like in Last Tango under that overpass, except my shot catches up with Peter, plowing through the dark and puddles, towards Claire and here I am, stuck in my apartment and more in love with Claire than I would have imagined possible. ''What do you mean you don't know? It's pretty simple. Either you let him in of you don't." "Oh Jimmy. Jimmy," Claire says. Then: "I need to go," and I laugh, a stupid sounding laugh that is something else pretending
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to be a laugh, though it's not foobng anyone. "Why's that?" I say. "I need to go jimmy, lel's not get started on this right now." "Started on what?" I say. "I need to go," she says. "Call me tomorrow," I say. Then I hear Claire's buzzer, as though Peter is standing down there with grinding teclh, leaning furiously on the poor little button. "I need to go," Claire whispers. The buzzer screeches again. I sit listenillg to the clicks and then l.hc dial tone and the phone is still to my car and I consider giving Peter a minute or two to get up the six llights and tJ1en calling back and he'd see my name on ilic Caller ID and he'd fall to ills knees in tears and she wouldn't know what to do and it seems like it would serve iliem both righL I think how my love lor Claire is like when you're driving on a highway alone, some long and necessary drive, il's not like you're going to the beach, and you're sick of ilic radio and all the san1e songs, so you're looking out the window at the horizon, which, for once, isn't obscured by tJ1c tree line and the sun is going down behind Lhis huge gray cloud, shooting down shafts of light on the land ahead and you're trying to figure out what the cloud looks like, trying to iliink, maybe that looks like a man iliere with two arms thntst up in l.he air, the middle part is ills head, but of course it doesn't look like a man and you know, though you don't admit it to yourself, that it doesn't really look like anything, but still, you try like hell to think of something it could took like, try and force the connection iliat isn't iliere. I �wake up ilie next morning, to the Sinm10ns's crac;hing television across the way. It's early but I haven't worked since my mother died a little over a year ago and I inherited fifty thousand dollars. My dad wrote me the check and said, "Now you should invest this. Then youth have something to fall back on." Instead, I quit my job and made some long shot investments. I bought a car and then moved from Dupont Circle to iliis new place. I hit on a technology stock that returned forty-eight thousand on a three
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thousand dollar investment in just two weeks. My mother didn't have cancer or anythjng drawn out She was killed in a car accident when an eighteen-wheeler changed lanes without looking. My tmcle called and told me, because my father was almost completely silent until after the ftmeral I tried to distract myself with the details of the wake, the flowers for the fi.Ineral but all I could think was, My mom is dead. My mother is dead. She is dead. My motl1er is deceased. My mom, she is dead. She is not alive, but she is dead. I get out of bed and check the Caller ID. About tlnee months ago Claire came over to my apartment after a big fight with Peter. She'd slapped Peter and he'd shoved her into the television. Claire said the screen broke with a wild, swallowing pop and she'd landed in the scatter of silver glass. I did my best to clean the blistered swells of blood on her palm, washed it, picked at it witl1 tweezers. She inched her way closer to me on the couch and I knew what was going to happen and I thought tl1at it was probably not a good idea, but tl1en maybe, in anoilier way, it wasn't so bad, was about caring and we ended up having sex. Afterwards we were lying on ilie carpet, ilie fibers tickling my back. Claire shivered and said, "I'm cold ." I rolled over on top of her and I kissed her on ilie ear lobe. She laughed and said iliat now she was warm. For ilie next two and a half months we would have sex in her apartment and ilien she would put her clothes back on and kick me out, because she and Peter were still inexplicably togeilier. I some6mes thought I might sit out in my car and when Peter showed up I'd tell him tl1e trutl1. But I always panicked and rushed ilirough tl1e back streets, avoiding ilie Metro stop, bent over ilie steering wheel. I send Claire an email. So what happened? Any drama? Let me Jwow. I'll be home. I sit and listen to ilie Simmons's television, which iliey've got, as iliey always do, tuned to a souiliem cooking show witl1 an obese, bearded chef who screams, "Off we go!" every few minutes. There
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arc only four apartments in the little complex I live in and I'm the only person in the complex tmder the age of sixty. Our little brick complex seems to be one of the only buildings in t11c surrounding area that was probably built before 1970. All around \IS smootl1 looking, flimsy buildings with incredible rents arc nying up. Once, in the middle of tl1e alTair, Peter invited me over to his place for fondu. It \vas just the tl1ree of us and I kept waiting for Peter to say he knew what was going on, goddamnit and it was going to stop. I kept btmlping Claire's little metal stick with mine, liking the small plinking sound I pretended Peter couldu't hear. Claire might look up at Peter with her light green eyes imd say tl1at she was sorry, that the whole thing was a mistake, tJmt I meant noiliing to her and all this would happen while I sat t11erc wit11 a cheesy lump of bread impaled on the silver tines of my fondu stick. Sometimes I ask Claire why she continues her charade with Peter. "Because," she says, "it's not a charade, Jimmy. Except maybe in your mind." Out in the courtyard, peering into my mirror is Mrs. Simmons, her bony back balled up. She's wearing a long blue skirl. She always wears long blue skirts. I imagine that she and her hHsband have been living in this apartment for decades, were here back when this part of town was nicer, lived here through the slow encroachment of the projects. I imagine she's a bigot who complains about our black neighbors. "Do you like it?" I ask. The sunlight makes her bluish hair shine. "Is this yours?" She points to ilic mirror, her fmger trembling. Ilcr bloodless lips arc pursed. "Yeah. Spmce up tl1e courtyard," I say. Stepping out of the doorway I bump a CD case so I reach down and grab iL Mrs. Simmons goes back to ga7ing at her reflection, snuffiing loudly, pulling back thin lips to expose rows of yello''~sh teet11, which she picks at with a long fmgemail The patch of concrete
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immediately in front of her door is the only area free of brown, wet-bent leaves. I turn the CD case over in my hands but there's nothing on it, just the reflection of my face and I forgot to shave again. The big apartment complex across the street is being remodeled. Scaffolding slung with white tarpaulins against the finally absent rain. In my car I put the CD on. The first track is the Talking Heads, "I Wish You Wouldn't Say That' and I laugh as I take a left on M Street. Peter makes these CDs and must have left it outside my door last night. The sun is shining down through my sun roof, bright and clear, occasionally patched from the thin trees lining the sidewalk as I head towards U Street, where there's a coffee shop that isn't a chain and has dirty tables. It has board games stacked lopsided on a metal rack inside the door, alternative newspapers and very strong coffee. Sometimes Claire used to put her hand over mine while I drove, without a word, just placed it there for a moment or two and then took it away again. Peter had been, for a while, what I guess you would call my best friend. lie was the person I called when I found out about my mother. lie brought some beer with him and we sat in my old apartment and didn't say much. Each rime he got up and said, "Beer?" I wanted to jump up from my seat and tell him that finally here was someone who understood. The coffee shop is busy with punk teenagers in rattling leatl1er jackets, colorfully spiked hair. In one corner is this pale old man I've seen several times before. lie sits over there glowering into his drink the white wisps of his hair drifting down. The baristas are friends wiili all iliese kids and so it takes me awhile to get my coffee, everyone shoving around the cotmter as though we're at a rock concert. I brought my moilier to this place once. She loved iliis shop, the kids wiili snarling lips and manic piercings. She'd tell me about her hippy life back in ilie sixties. She'd tell me how she didn't shave for two solid years, how her hair had clumped into
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drcds from months l-vithout washing how when she came back to normal life she had to shave her head. "I looked like a prisoner and I felt like one," she told me while we sat drinking the biller shots of espresso six months before she died, Sex Pistols had been beating out of the shop's milk flecked stereo. I'm sitting in the corner when Peter walks in. No one else seems to notice him, though he's awfully out of place in that business suiL I just watch him and he sits on a rickety, wood chair the wrong way, gripping U1e backrest in a tight embrace. "We need to Lalk jimmy." "Yeah," I say. "I get that impression." Peter has a long face, like a nom1al sized face was put in a vice and the handle was given a couple vigorous turns. Long forehead, stretched chin, eyes too close together, a narrow nose jabbing down the middle. "It's about Claire," Peter says. lie's got his hands folded in a manner I don't like. "Isn't everything about Claire?" I ask. Peter blinks and goes on. "jimmy, I'm telling you this because you're my friend. Despite aJI this, you're still my friend." J wonder how he can act so self-satisfied with all his window banging, all his bUZ7ing and moaning. "See, I was talking to Claire last night and she told me you're still calling "here," he says. Trying to ignore Peter I catch the eye of a kid with a green mohawk at the next table. I give him a wink. lie gets up roughly from his seat and takes his mostly empty glass of water up to the bar, where he leans, snarling over his shoulder at me and so I have to face Peter again. Peter's hair is puffed up, blown dry and it makes his head look impossibly bigger. lie's wearing a blue tie with a tiny knot up tmder his golf ball Adan1's apple. "See, the thing is, Claire asked me to tell you to stop calling her," Peter says and he's looking at the back of his hands now, his long tllin fmgers with eerily perfect fmgemails. I sit up a little in my chair. "What?" I ask.
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"She says she doesn't want to talk to you right now and asks that you stop calling her." Peter blinks like he's reading note cards. "Oh yeah," I say. "This doesn't mean she doesn't w.mt to talk to you ever again, just not right now. Do you understand? I mean, she and I are trying to work this thing out We're trying to make this work and it's just not going to work if you're calling her up ten, fifteen times a day." Peter is nodding at me as though he agrees wholeheartedly. "Ten or fifteen times a day?" I ask. These people are lunatics I decide. "Just cool it," Peter says, leaning forward and I wonder, with that look he's giving me now, if he's trying to intimidate me, if he remembers I've been working out over tJ1e past few months while he's been slouching arotmd his office job. Which makes me wonder why he isn't in his job right now, since his office is all the way up in Bethesda, Maryland. "Fine. Perfectly cool," I say and sip my still-scalding coffee. All around us is the noise of steam gargling through milk. Like an animal in mid-moan. Peter stands up, but for a minute he doesn't move and I wish everyone in the shop were looking at us, the barista with a large round stud through her lip, the green mohawk guy, Ute pasteyfaced old man with thin white hair riding up off his liver spotted scalp but no one is. I feel like kicking the table so it slan1s into Peter's scrawny thighs. Then I will jump up from my seat and wring his neck. "Jimmy," Peter says, stuffing his hands into his pocket and looking down at his feet "Yes, Peter? What are you going to say? What can you say that you haven't said fifteen times?" My face is Oushing. "I don't know Jimmy," he says and then I can't stop myself and I say, "That's because you're a fucking moron." lie looks at me and for a minute I'm worried that he might start crying, but instead he just turns and walks out of ilie shop, the bronze bell clattering.
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I wait three minutes and then get up, take my cofiee with me and get in my car. There's ajoni Mitchell song on the CD, which keeps me from tossing it out the window and I'm humming along while I drive across town towards Claire's apartment. I can't find a parking space. I'm cursing and banging my hands on the steering wheel until a spot opens four blocks from her place. I jog to her building, press the button next to the nun1ber 613. "'Hello?" Claire's voice crackles. "Hello there," I say and I nearly laugh, because I feel for an instant, terribly good about everything. I've felt this way before. A week after my mother died. I was back in my old apartment in Dupont and just standing there, looking at my furniture, at the smooth, glimmering face of the television lightly touched by a layer of dust and I felt like I was rising quickly out of a sweet sleep into a cool day after a long sunm1er of heat "Jimmy?" Claire says. H er voice is smoked with static and louder than it needs to be. "Yes," I say, but I don't know if she even hears it because she immediately says, "Didn't Peter call you." "Can I come up?" I say. "Didn't you talk to Peter?" Claire roars and just then one of her neighbors walks up. lie holds the door for me and I let go of the intercom button. The doom1an nods at us. The elevator hums up to the sixth floor. I knock softly on Claire's door. "Hello?" she says. She's making herself look kind of stupid, I think to myself before answering, "Yeah, it's me." "IIow did you get in here?" she asks. "I climbed up the side of the building. Can you let me in?" "I'd rather not," she says. H er voice is muffied, as though she's talking into a pillow. "Why's that?" I ask. "Didn't Peter call you?" she says. "What tl1e fuck is this, Claire?"' I say, a little loudly, before I notice that someone, a fat, bald-headed old man, has just gotten ofT the elevator and he looks at me for a second before shuffling
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down the hallway. "Couldn't we pretend to be adults or something?" I say, calmly, quietly. "God," Claire says. "Not uow, Jimmy. Just go." "Fine," I say and turn and walk away from the door. I skip the elevator, run down the stairs. Walking back uphill to my car I feel like kicking something and almost decide on a hunkering blue mailbox, but stop myself because a bus crests the hill and coasts, full of faces, past me. I walk arotmd my apartment trying to figure out what the hell is going on. My toilet, which sometimes won't flush, is gurgling loudly. I call Claire but she doesn't answer. I call back. No answer. I call again and leave a message, asking her to please give me a call when she gets back in. Then I call back and when the machine picks up I hold my cordless right up to the toilet tank, water churning like a hungry stomach. I think about Claire and Peter standing next to me at my mother's funeral. The casket had been closed. Claire had laid her hand on my arm that day over and over, as though she wanted to take something from me, when the lntth was I didn't need her for anything, which is what Peter seemed to understand and I remember thinking, afterwards, after my dad went back into his life and away from mine and after I quit my job, tl1at I wished everyone could tmdcrstand tlllngs the way it seemed Peter did, which is to see that what people mostly need is to just to be left alone. With my TV off and the phone in its cradle I can hear the Simmons's television. "OIT we go!" the fat bastard is hollering from across the courtyard. I try to read but can't concentrate and then I notice I'm not looking at the page of type anymore, am staring down at my crotch and thinking, I hate you. I stand up and grab my crotch roughly and think, Where have you gotten me? and then I walk into the kitchen and start rummaging through the drawers. I pull out these big heavy scissors you could use to cut cardboard and I lay iliem on the counter. Then I unzip my pants and pull them down, along with my boxSpring/Summer 2002 101
ers. I look down at my dick hanging there and my balls and all the dark pubic hair and this just makes me more angry, them just dangling so I grab the cutting board with the corner that melted in the dishwasher. Lifting my genitals with one hand I tuck the cutting board underneath. The plastic feels cool against my skin and the thin hairs on the back of my neck stand up and this just makes me more angry, so I grab the scissors. My scrotum is flattened out, like it was recklessly inflated then violently burst and the straggly hairs are going in ridiculous directions. I've got the scissors in one hand and the other is holding the cutting board and I'm trying to figure this out when I hear an awful gargling scream. "Sonofabitch," I say and pull the cutting board away with a snap of my wrist and knock it hard against my testicles which makes my head swim. Tugging up my pants I grip the scissors and walk to my door and I think I should never have moved to this neighborhood, should never have quit my job. I could be leading a life. I walk past the mirror, slightJy crooked on the jagged tree bark and tl1en I start potmding on the Simmons' hollow aluminum door. No one answers so I bang louder and shout, "Hello! What the fuck? Hello!" I think I can hear someone moaning or talking inside, but there's also the maddening television so I open the door and step in. The layout of tl1e apartment is just like mine, a small foyer leading quickly into a living room, so I only need to take a few steps to see what is going on. Mr. Simmons is lying on the floor, on his back and Mrs. Simmons is kneeling next to him, her bluish hair bobbing up and down and she is moaning and her hands are clasped in front of her. The apartment smells like old cigarettes and there are ashtrays everywhere, odd angled butts jammed carelessly together. I run across the carpet, which is older and dirtier than mine and over the fat man on TV who's waving a meat cleaver over his head, I shout 'What's wrong?" Mrs. Simmons looks up and tears nm out over her face like
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tangled streets and her wide eyes are red and she doesn't even try to talk, her head just shaking a little, hands quivering and Mr. Simmons has spittle at the edges of his lips, white foam and then I'm on my knees next to him and an1 rolling him onto his side and my index finger is in his mouth, which is wet and slick and clotted with more white foam. Mrs. Simmons just sits there, her whole body shaking violently and I grab the phone, dial 911, shout the address and then press my ear to Mr. Simmons's chest. and don't hear anything so I fmd his sternum and put my hands together and start pounding away, breathing into his foaming mouth after ten depressions. I'm not thinking of Claire and Peter, or of my father and the small urn of my motl1er's crumbly ash he keeps in his bedroom, all I'm thinking is one two three four up to ten, swipe with fmger and breathe, then go again. My hands will still be going up and down and my breath will be coming from deep in my chest when the ambulance arrives, the men in white jackets will push me aside. I'll drive Mrs. Sin1mons to DC General. The scissors will be bouncing in my pocket and the ambulance will crescendo down the street with a truly thrilling wail, strobe lights bouncing off the dirty faces of red brick buildings and I'll accelerate towards the corner with the wind slurring in my ears. I'll find the hospital with its crowded lobby, overweight motllers witll bawling children, old men holding dirty bandages to their heads and the nurse who will take Mrs. Simmons's arn1 and I'll be able to head back home with the weather perfect, my windows will be down and back at home I will call Claire and tell her about all this. I am not thinking about any of that. I an1 tJying not to press too hard on Mr. Simmons's thick chest, an1 trying to remember everytlling from CPR class in middle school gym class. I'm not thinking about Claire or Peter or anything other than Mr. Simmons, his spit in my mouth like old pennies.
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Terrance I /ayes
A Poem for Wisdom
Now ft;ends, we should ask all the wise ones here in this hall of wind to stand. For once we should pause and let the quick new stems in our mouths be stilJ. There arc wise ones here. Let us look upon their armor of silver and fault lines oldet� than the moon. II ave you seen them sitting quiedy in the middle of Winter? I lave you asked to be taken to the attic where their books and albums are kept? Let us look, now, at the poverty of youth: the ink of its money staining our hands. Let us look down at our shadows covering dust and the tracks left by so much tilling and running away. Those who build tombs, have no use for the wise. There is wisdom in the pasture, People. There is wisdom in the blackbird
d1at waits for us in the skull of dle tree. Let us knock the dirt from our shoes before we visit the house of the wise ones.
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Let us listen to the way their bread breathes as it is lowered to the table. FI�iends, we should ask all the wise ones here in this hall of wind to stand. Ask them who built this city, Who made this sky? Ask them from what river our holiness came.
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Terrance Ilayes
More Theories of Duncnde & Teaching th e I nexp licab le
"I want d1ere lo be no eyes for d1e mghl, I no flower ofgold for my heart" "Ghazal of the Terrible Presence," Federico Garcia Lorca
Suppose for a moment that you arc a poet and a teacher of poetry. In your Beginning Poetry W orkshop you have been exposing your students to what you know to be safe poems. When you taught them the principles of imagery, you brought in a few poems by the deep image poets. When you taught them how to employ figurative language, perhaps you brought in a few poems by Billy Collins, the genius of metaphor. It is late in the semester now. There have been quizzes and midterms concerning the craft of poetry. There have been several of the flat, cliche-ridden wo rkshops you dread. Perhaps you have mentioned Lorca. If you have risked reading his work to tJ�em, you have been careful to steer them away from less "concrete" aspects of his poetry. Rightly so. In the wrong hands/minds such a poet could inspire anarchy. lie might give certain misguided students a license to write poems that mistake mystery for obscurity... It is nearing the end of the semester and you still have not discussed that inexplicable llniJg you believe essential to poetry... In his pivotal 1975 book, Leaping Poe/Jy: An Idea wid1 Poems and Translations, Robert Bly alTers several assertions about the history of surrealism and its roots in American poetry of' the era. Early on he traces the Poet' s loss and subsequent rediscovery of the powers of the unconscious:
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"Freud pointed out that the dream still retained the fantastic freedom of association known to us before only from ancient art By the end of the nineteenth century both the poem and the dream had been set free ... The poets then began to devote their lives to deepening the range of association in the poem... It is tllis movement that has given such fantastic energy to 'modem poetry' ..." 1 In addition to surrealism, Leaping Poetry offers a brief meditation on Frederico Garcia Lorca's theory of Duende in a two and a half page section called "Wild Association." In it Bly includes a Lorca quote which implies that Duende can only be grasped through metaphor: "To help us seek the Duende there are neither maps nor discipline. All one knows is that it bums the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles..." 2 Mter reading Leaping Poetry I knew Duende to be no more than the gypsy-cousin of surrealism. Curiosity led me to Bly's chief source, Lorca's 1933 essay, "Theory and Play of Duende." We might for a moment distinguish Duende from surrealism through the metaphor of music. Where surrealism is popularly recognized in music and images akin to Peter Gabriel's very, very cool Eighties video, "SledgeHammer," we fmd Duende in the late jazz ofJohn Coltrane, which contains so much raw energy it's close to incoherent, uncontainable. I'm thinking in particular of Ohm, Coltrane's 1965 album on Impulse Records. It's full of chants from selected verses of the Bhagavad Gita; it's full of dropped cymbals that sound like thunder, and horns that sound like cows being strangled. I read somewhere that Coltrane wanted it to be a kind of mystical listening exercise. On the album's liner notes critic Nat IlentofT, insists that "emotions are the way into tills music rather than intellectual diagran1s or quick categorical guidelines... "3 lie was in pursuit of the spirit-world, the inexpressible, something that could only be achieved through in1provisation. Something very much like what Lorca sought: "poSpring/Summer 2002 107
etic emotion which is uncontrolled and virginal, free of walls... "4 To explain the mystery and importance of Duende to artistic expression, Lorca tells the story of a great Andalusian singer whose performance leaves a modest audience unimpressed one night in a little tavern in Cadiz. "Here we care notl1ing about ability, technique, skill. Here we are after something else," they seem to say, according lo Lorca. The songstress then tears at her expensive gown, guzzles a tall glass of burning liquor and begins "to sing with a scorched throat: without voice, without breath or color but with Duende" all to the crowd's raucous approval. Lorca says, "She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her Duende might come and deign to fight her hand to hand..." 5 Lorca's anecdote makes me think of Billie Holiday... Once a friend and I argued late into tl1e night (argued until I lost my voice) about whether or not Billie Holiday was a great singer. This friend said in what I remember now as the voice of Mr. Spock that she might have been a great stylist, but that her singing was never technically correct. Her poor technique had, in fact, mined her voice, he said. I didn't have Lorca's essay then. The despair I felt that night is similar to the feeling I've had in my poetry courses after discussing a poem like Lorca's "Gha.zal of the Terrible Presence." When I bring in Lorca's Duende essay for my students, they all seem to nod in comprehension. The tmth, however, is revealed when they turn in their Duende-imitations (an oxymoron). Though I am pleased that many of their poems are more playful and surprising than their typical narrative poems, what they achieve is often closer to surrealism than to Duende. Surrealism of course has its merits. In the seventies, Robert Bly, James Wright and others were translating the French and Spanish surrealists for the first time. ln Anlerica, surrealism flourished in the decade following Vietnan1 just as it had flourished in France during the World Wars. The phrase itself was coined by
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French writer Apolliniare when he saw a 1917 Jean Cocteau ballet that revealed a truth beyond the real, "a kind of sur-realism."6 Andre Breton later adapted the concept and aligned it with Freud's teaching as well as some anti-war, anti-state ideologies. It's not difficult to see the parallels between surrealism and the failings of government and culture. Stephen Dobyns says in B est Words Best Orders Essays on Poetry that he began his wonderfully surreal Cemetery Nights in 1981, believing "realism was an inadequate way to deal with the world's excesses ... "' Dobyns and several other poets (Rita Dove's in her first book, The YeUow !louse on the Corner and Leslie Ullman in her first book, Natural IJist~ ries, for example) indulged in the freedom and surprise surrealism seemed to elicit. And while most of these poets eventually outgrew surrealism, a few delved deeper into the nuances of its and possibilities. Among them was Larry Levis. H ere is "Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966" from his 1981 collection, The Dol/maker's Ghost. The men who killed poetry Hated silence... Now they have plenty. In the ossuary at Granada There are over four thousand calm skulls Whitening; the shrubs are in leaf Behind the bones. And if anyone tries to count spines lie can feel his own scalp start to crawl Back to its birthplace. Once, I gave you a small stone I respected. When I turned it over in the dawn, Aller staying up all night Its pale depths Resembled the tense face of Lorca Spitting into an empty skull. Why did he do that?
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Someone should know. Someone should know by now that the stone Was only an anmlet to keep the dead away. And though your long bones Have nothing to do with Lorca, or tl1ose deaths Forty years ago, in Spair1, The trees fill with questions, and summer. lie would not want, tonight, another elegy. lie would want me to examine the marriage of wings Beneath your delicate collar bones: They breath, The ribs of your own poems breath. And here is our dark house at tl1e end of tl1e lane. And here is the one light we have kept on all year For no one, or Lorca, And now he comes toward it Wiili six bulletholes in his chest, Walking lightly So he will not disturb the sleeping neighbors, Or ilie almonds withering in their frail arks Above us. lie does not want to come in. lie stands embarrassed under ilie street lamp In his rumpled suit.. Snow, lullabye, anvil of bone That terrifies the blacksmith in his sleep, Your house is breath.8 Just beyond the doors of surrealism, Levis found Duende. Throughout his career his work remained, for the most part, dark, associative, and musical. And I should add, political, which I
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think is a vital part of Duende even if it is no longer vital to surrealism. Levis was a master of the political metaphor, if there is such a thing. It is evident, for example, in "Anastasia and Sandman" from Elegy his posthumous collection, and in "At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans," from his 1991 collection, The Widening SpeD of Leaves. In "Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966" we find it in the first line's reference to the "men who killed poetry." The poem is both a broad allusion to "men" who shun Poetry/Art/ Expression, and a specific historical allusion to the men responsible for "those deaths/ Forty years ago, in Spain" during the Spanish Civil War and "the six bullet holes" which assassinated Lorca. Ultimately the poem chooses a dark and quiet tone, a sensual address to the "you" which enters in the second stanza over a more direct commentary on poetry and resistance. "Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966" is an example of political metaphor, I think, because it asks us to intuit its social and historical meaning through image and gesture not direct statement. This contrasts the way Lorca handled politics in many of his poems. For example, the closing lines of his poem "New York" read: "I attack the conspiring I of these empty offices I that will not broadcast the sufferings, I that mb out the plans of the forest, I and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed in cattle I when there mooing fills the valley /where the Hudson is getting dmnk on its oil."9 This statement feels much more urgent, much more politically forthcoming than anything Levis wrote. Both poets share a faith in the inexplicable, however. Their poems often turn away from "the logic of traditional metaphor" to intages that "evade rational analysis." 10 If we are to talk about teaching Duende, it's important to talk about its more incoherent aspects. This may be the inevitable nature of such a concept. And just as surrealism can become formulaic and pseudo-intellectual, Duende can become no more than raw emotion. Readers have been known to dismiss botJ1 concepts as trivial and undisciplined. In The Generation of2000:
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An Anthology of Contemporary Poets, editor William H eyen, reacts against such kinds of expression. "If there is an editorial slant that helped fom1 this wide ranging collection," he says in the book's introduction, "it is against the kind of quasi-surrealist poem that Wallace Stevens made f1m of when he said that 'To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover.' It is understandable but tragic that there is so much distracting silbness and indulgence in poetry during this critical point in human history..." 11 (Oddly, Levis, who was part of the generation H eyen anthologizes and had published three award winning books by the time of its pubbcation, is not included in Heyen's book.) A counter to H eyen and Stevens can be found in the following Lorca assertion:
"Very often intellect is poetry's enemy because it is too much given to imitation, because it lifts the poet to a throne of sharp edges and makes him oblivious of the fact that he may suddenly be devoured by ants, or a great arsenic lobster may fall on his head. " 12 ll's also ironic that much of Stevens' poetry reflects a cool (danm-near cold-blooded) sense of Duende. (That is, if Duende can be cool.) H ere are the closing stanzas of "God is Good. It is Beautiful Night" from his 1947, book TraJJsport to Summer.
In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book. It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial Rendezvous,
Picking thin music on the rustiest string, Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump Of summer. The venerable song falls from your fiery wings. The song of the great space of your age pierces
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The fresh night. 13 Words like and "scholar" and "celestial" and "venerable" might cool the fires tJ1e Duende present here, but they don't stan1p it out. lie seems to have found his way to Duende not tJuough spontaneous passion or social conviction but through language. "In your !moon] light, the head is speaking." The way syntax allows him to shift from image to image building elaborate associations in lines like "It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial / Rendezvous, // Picking thin music on the rustiest string, I Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump I Of summer." Perhaps this makes him a kind of surrealist, but his frequentJy dark tones and images make him a kind of (unlikely) disciple of Duende. Lorca, I think, was interested in diction or syntax, but as it related to the freer, more emotional aspects of music, to primordial rhythm and anaphora. Flamenco, jazz, spirituals, "Deep Song," and most every other kind of song enchanted him. Many of his poems hang on ladders of incantatory refrains. Ilere, for example are lines 18-30 from the Greg White and Stephen F. Simon's translation of "Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms": Oh, Cuba, oh rhythm of dried seeds! I am going to Santiago. Oh, fiery waist, oh, drop of wood! I am going to Santiago. Ilarp living tree trunks. Crocodile. Tobacco plant in bloom! I am going to Santiago. I always said I'd go to Santiago in a coach of black water. I am going to Santiago. My coral darkness, I an1 going to Santiago. The sea drowned in sand, I am going to Santiago. 14
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The poem continues in the same manner. Certain words and phrases in this poem connote Duende where they do not connote surrealism: "moon," "black water," "darkness," "rhythm." Eveu the exclamation marks, which are generally taboo in contemporary American poetry, reflect a certain necessary ecstasy. The poetry teacher, of course, cannot show the student how to access ecstasy or the blood and spirit of his or her own poem. One can, however, show students what otl1ers have done; one can guide them. This is not news. The problems arise when presenting students with a concept that wants no guide, no messenger, a concept that reveals the pitfalls of quantifiable analysis/ explanation. What happens when students are directed to practice such a concept? Their innocent desire to produce the magic of tl1e inexplicable often inspires genuine contrivance. The methods (tricks) I use most frequently to help my students unlock their Duende involve ilie principles of imitation. I bring in several poems that demonstrate the qualities of Duende. After we have exhausted our usual discussion of tl1e individual elements at work in the poem, the assignment I give involves an imitation of tone and mood railier tl1an of concrete techniques evident in the poem. For example, in an imitation of "Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms" I might ask iliem to conveys a mysterious desire ilirough a poem that is both narrative and nonlinear. Such exercises often have pleasing results even if they don't permanently transform the way the students approach poetry. In fact, I don't want to imply that iliere is an exercise that somehow shows one how to produce Duende. It resists being engaged by way of guidelines and instructions. Interestingly enough, similar challenges arise in the teaching of prose poems. Many successful prose poems often have tl1e wit and surprise of surrealism, but also the mystery and gristle of Duende. Moreover, both seem to potentially undermine all beginning students have learned about the elements of poetry. just as Duende can foster superficial surrealist properties, the prose poem can inspire Jlat, amusical paragraphs. In the end of his essay, "Portrait of
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the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subject Ideas on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems," prose poet, RusseU Edson says, "The Prose Poem is an approach, but certainly not a lorm; it is art, but more general art tha11 most of the other arLs ... the spirit or approach which is represented in the prose poem is not spccilically literary..." 15 To be "not specifically literary" is in direct opposition to how we teach young poets, I t11ink. In the writing workshop one of the things "literary" primarily means being able to wield control over one's language and ideas. Boili Lorca and Edson, it seems, are opposed to such kinds of control; to "voice" classes; mathematical scansion; paint-by-number poems. But is to suggest eliminating that which is literary, also to suggest elinunating Tradition? That is, should we do away wiili ilie literary CaJlOn, as well as our models and technjques for teaching poetry if om- students arc to discover what Edson calls "ilic joy and energy of general creation and substance"? 16 According to Lorca, "The Dueude's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old plru1es unknown feelings of freshness, wiili ilie qua)jty of somethiug newly created, like a miracle, a11d it produces au almost religious enthusiasm... "17 The question th en becomes, is it a teacher's job to leach young poets how to in1agine, how 10 feel? This is ridiculous, or course, but to teach the craft or poetry as if it is all there is to poetry, it the equivalent of trying to teach ilie craft of emotion. We seem to imply that the clever execution of elements like metaphor and image arc aU it takes to communicate one's feelings. Concepts like Duende, are boili ilie most difficult/slippery a11d tJ1e most necessary to teach if students are to see poems as somctJ1ing more ilian mere machines they can assemble. In workshops IJ1e concept of Duende is iudispcnsable because it de mands risk. Duende demands, eliminating (or at least revising) U1c notion of evaluation, of end products and quantifiable works where poetry is concerned. Like ilie Imagination, like ilic Unconscious, like Emotion itself, Duende cannot be measured. To our students
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we must say as the audience in Cadiz said to the singer, that ultimalely "we care nothing about ability, technique, skill. H ere we are after something else... " We must acknowledge it, wrestle with it: the terrible presence of the inexplicable.
Notes
1 Bly, Robert Leaping Poet:Ty: An Idea with Poems and Transla11ons. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p . 6. 2 Ibid, p. 29. 3 Fraim, John. SoiJg Catche1; The Life and M of]ofm Coltrane. (Ohio: GreatHouse Books,1996), p. 188. 4 Lorca, Federico Garcia. In Sea~dJ ofD uende. ed. Christopher Maurer. (New York: New Directions), p viji. 5 Ibid, p. 52-53. 6 O'Mahony, Mike. Essen11al Surrealists. ed. Martin, Tim. (London: Demsey Park, 1999), p. 7. 7 Dobyns, Stephen. Best Wo1ds, Best 0IdeJ; E~says on Poe11y. (New York: St. Martins, 1996), p. 307. 8 Levis, Larry. The Dollmaker's Ghost (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Press), p. 48. 9 Lc-1ping Poeby, RobertBly's translation of"New York." p. 37-38. 10 In Searc.h ofDuende. p viii. 11 Heyen, William. The General1on of2000:Contemporary American Poets. ed. William H eyen. (New Jersey: Ontario Review Press, 1984), p. xxXXI.
12 Leaping Poe11y, p. 29.
13 Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 285. 14 Lorca, Federico Garica. Selected Ttb:se. (New York: Farrar, Stnus Giroux, 1995), p. 237. 15 Edson, Russell. "Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man." A Field Gwde to Contemporary Poel1y and Poeo"cs. eds. Stuart Friebertand David Young. (New York: Longman, 1980) p 302. 16 Ibid. p 302. 17 In Sea~dJ ofDuende, p. 53.
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Terrance I Ia.yes
Serenade
I want to alw�ays sleep beneath a b�ight red blanket ofleaves. I \�'ant to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to learn the language of a Chilean poet I want to say God & fuck you & touch me without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle & the turtle's father, the stone. I want a mouth full of pem1issions & a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower & ant hill can return after sleeping three seasons, I want to walk out of this house wea1ing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to f.ght off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves & winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind & I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, & neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours & endings, your disapprovals, your doubts & regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper's fury & the salt's tenderness. I want the eight-sided passion of sugar, but not its need. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not it<; gossip. I want the moon's intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city & find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame and song. I want to be your breath.
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john Bennett
Untitled No. 2
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Contributors' Notes
John M. Bennett's most recent books include Mailer Leaves flam (Pantograph Press), rOUing COMBers (Potes & Poets Press), Ditch Clod1 (Xtantbooks), and The Chapters: 1980-2001 (co-author, Robin Crozier) (Luna Bisonte Prods. lie is editor of the avant-garde journal Lost a.nd FoUJJd Times, and Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at tl1e Ohio State University Libraries. Richard N. Bentley is an urban planner. lie currently teaches at Western New England College and the University of Massachusetts. In 1994 he won the Paris Review/Paris Writers Workshop International Fiction Award. Sarah Dickerson, Michigan native, earned her Master's degree in Composition and Communications at Central Michigan University, and more recently, recieved her MFA from University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing program. She lives in Coralville Iowa with her two daughters, Esther and Emily, where she plans to stay. Andrea Drugay is a San Francisco-based artist and writer. Iler poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals including Karamu, The Appalad1ee Review, ZllZu's Petals, Wings, and Unlikely Stories. Terrance Hayes' second book of poems, flip Logic (Penguin 2002) was a National Poetry Series selection. H e received a
Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Muscular Music, his debut collection. His poems have also recently appeared in Ilarvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Soudlem Review. lie is currently a memember of the creative writing faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Christian Horlick was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in Ohio. lie received his Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University in May 2002. He has
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been published in New Millennium U� Dng.s-, !Iayden's Ferry h Review, and The Clackamas Literary Review. Darin Kerr has recently completed his M.A. in English at the University of North Dakota. lie currently resides in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I lis work has appeared recently in Nor/JJ Country. Sean Aden Lovelace is a reader, writer, runner, teacher, and registered nurse. lie recently graduated from the University of Alabama MFA progran1. lie recently published in Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, New Orleans Review, and so on. lie enjoys canoeing and the game of bocce. Ander Monson is originally from Upper Michigan and has lived most of his life in the Midwest and the Middle East IIis recent work can be found (or is forthcoming) in Alaskl Quarterly Review, Fence, QuarLcrly Ui-st; Gulf Coast; West Branch, and tile New Orleans Review. Nathan Oates's fiction has appeared in The Louisville Review, Eyeshot, Opil1111 Magazine and Pindeldyboz. lie has studied at the Center for Writers in IIattiesburg, MS and will be attending tile Writing Seminars at j ohns IIopkins in the Fall of
2002.
Erica Olsen lives in San Francisco. IIer writing has appeared recently in ZJZZYVA and lhgb Country News.
Amy Parker was born in Okinawa and grew up in East Asia, Australia, and Turkey. She recieved a B.A. in Comparative Literature and French from Indiana University, Bloomington, and was granted a Michener fellowship in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where she has just completed her M.F.A. She is currently engaged in monastic practice in Clifornia. This is her first published piece.
Oliver Rice received the 1998 Theodore Roethke Prize. lie was nominated recently for a Pushcart Prize and featured on Poetry Daily. Appears in Ohio Review's anthology New and Selected and in Bedford/St. Martin's college textbooks, Poetry:
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An Introduction, and Tbe Bedford Introduction to Literature.
Gregory Seagle teaches Writing Fiction at Towson University and Playwriting in the Schools for Baltimore's Center Stage. His musical Albert, a Jungian fairytale fantasy was produced by the Baltimore Laboratory Theater; and his short story Ezra was published in The Dickinson Review. In addition, he has won several fiction prizes. Suzy Spraker earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has been published in The Greensboro Review, Arasa11, The Berkeley Ficdon Review, Carve Magazine, and a fortJ1coming issue of The Soud1em Review. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. Elizabeth Brewster Thomas is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Missouri, where she has received two Academy of American Poets Prizes. Her poems have appeared or are ford1coming in Tbe Paris Review, Nimrod, Southem Poetry Review and other journals. Victoria Tolbert, a Kentucky native residing in Seattle, Washington, has presented her work in a variety of venues including Insomniacathon 2000 in Louisville, Kentucky and ilie 2001 United Nations "Dialogue Among Nations" global poetry event. Her poetry has appeared in LouisVIlle Urban V01ce and Another Cmcago Magazine among oiliers. Reach her at victoria_tolbert@hotmail.com. Tora Triolo, who currently lives in upstate New York, was a 1996 graduate of ilie University of ldal10. She earned her Masters in English from The College of Saint Rose. H er work can be found in So to Speak: A Femimst ]oumal of Language and Art, as well as various self-publications scattered throughout ilie cotmtry. Margaret Walther is a librarian at the Aurora Public Library, past president of Columbine Poets Inc., a statewide organization to promote poetry in Colorado, and has been a guest editor for Buffalo Bones. Iler poetry has appeared in
Spring/Summer 2002 121
Comstock Review, Ka.ramu, Lucid Stone, Gertrude, and other journals. She has a poem forthcoming in Plainso11gs.
Ellen Wehle is an editor at an advertising agency. She has been feat1Jred at the Boston and Worcester poetry festivals, and her book, The Blue Route, was a fmalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize in 2001. She lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Pamela Yenser, a Midwesterner from Wichita, Kansas, now lives in theNorthwest. She was a nominee for the Pushcart Prize XXVII, winner of anAmerican Academy of Poets award at the University of Washington, and ftrst-place recipient of a H annibal poetry contest Iler poems and essays appear in Asce11t, Elysian Fields, Iowa Woman, Kansas Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Pivot, Shenandoah, and Poetry Northwest H er work is collected in publications of The Spirit That Moves Us Press (Iowa City) and (Vancouver).
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